Strangely, googling for answers to this problem turns up surprisingly little. But there's so much noise out there on understanding Google, maybe there are lost gems of wisdom I just can't find.
I did find one clever-sounding solution a little while back, and that was to add a meta tag to the top-level page, with content="noindex,follow". That is, don't index this page, but follow all the links on it. Seemed like a great idea at the time, surely Google would ignore www.kehlet.cx/ but index everything else, using their permalinks. Bad idea, big time. Searching for "kehlet" or "steve kehlet" used to put me on the top page, but I become non-existent for about a month or two after I tried that (even though I pulled it right away).
Another solution I really liked is what ezine.daemonnews.org does. Going to that top-level URL issues a temporary redirect (302) to the most recent magazine page (as of today, http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200501/). But everyone says temporary redirects are a major no-no with Google. But, their PageRank doesn't seem to suffer for it, maybe it's worth a shot.
If anyone has any ideas on what is the right thing to do here, I'm all ears, please let me know.
- Google's description of their PageRank technology.
- Google PageRank Checker -- web interface to what the Google Toolbar would show you