Why would a link shown on OSE appear differently than the page containing the link?

[casper434]

I recently traded links with a site that I will call www.example.com   When I used open site explorer to check the link it came back with a different page authority as www.example.com/index.htm yet the link does appear on the www.example.com page. Why would this be?

[YannickVeys]

Because www.example.com and www.example.com/index.htm are (for search engines) 2 different pages, even though they have the same content.

The webmaster of example.com should redirect all index pages to his root domain. index.html, index.htm, Default.asp, index,aspx, etc, etc. The root domain should only be accessible via 1 url. www.example.com

[casper434]

Thanks very much. Makes sense and I had not thought of this.