Reciprocal links with /?ref=referrer

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Reciprocal links with /?ref=referrer

hostlead

1:11 pm on Aug 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

Hello,
I exchanged links with a site and they linked to my site using the below link. Is this ok?
[mydomain.com...]
or is it better to have a link like: [mydomain.com...]
Why do people use /?ref=SiteIExchangedLinkWith" anyway?

Please advise.

TIA

HostLead

Birdman

1:17 pm on Aug 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

It sounds like they want you to see how many users they refer to your site. I would undoubtedly ask them to change it to the url only. It could trigger the duplicate content filter because the same page will be returned but Google will treat them as two unique urls.

rogerd

3:16 pm on Aug 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

I've never had anyone put a link in this format before, but Birdman is certainly right. They want you to look in your logs and say, "Hey, look, these guys sent me __ visitors" when you see the requests for their query-string URL.

Ask 'em to dump the query string ASAP - tell 'em you'll check your referrer data if you want to know how many visitors they sent.

hostlead

3:36 pm on Aug 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

actually I don't believe they meant it in a bad way. :)
Really nice people. But like you guys said, I will ask them to change the link.
Once again thank you for the help.

HostLead

stinky

7:12 am on Aug 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

something similar happend with me, i exchanged links with a site and when i placed my mouse curser over my site link on there site, it read like this:
www.SiteIExchangedLinkWith.com/link.php?op=visit&lid=65
I did not see my web site URL, but when i clicked the link i saw the above url again and then it took me to my site. This persons site seems to be done in .php and they also have a hit counter next to my link on there page. Is this a bad link exchange? Will it increase my link pop or are links like this a waste of time?

Napoleon

7:16 am on Aug 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

>> www.SiteIExchangedLinkWith.com/link.php?op=visit&lid=65 <<

Looks like PHPnuke or similar. That's the standard way of doing it with this script.

stinky

8:02 am on Aug 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

Napoleon
will SE spiders including google, crawl through a link like this and find my site? I am trying to build up my link pop/PR are links from a site like this of no use for that or are they just as good as a regular .html link?
Thanks

Wired Suzanne

9:47 am on Aug 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

I linked with all kinds of referrers. Thought it was nice to see where traffic is coming from.

However, Google indexed all pages in 4-5 different ways and counted it as different pages. Google had 6000 page of my site indexed, while my site has only 2000 pages. And worst of all Split PR. All pages had PR2 or PR3.

I asked all linkers to change the link to me to mydomain.com without?abcd and now it is slowly getting better. PR5 is back again and the SERPs look ok again too. I'll never do that again.

dirkz

12:13 pm on Aug 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

www.SiteIExchangedLinkWith.com/link.php?op=visit&lid=65

Google will not pass any PR with this one.

http://www.mydomain.com/?ref=SiteIExchangedLinkWith

Google could pass PR, depends on the PR of the sending site and how long the link is. If the sending site is not relevant or the link is very long or both, Googlebot won't even follow it.

If Googlebot decides to count is a link, PR will only be given to exactly that URL, NOT www.mydomain.com. This is the experience Suzanne made the hard way.

dirkz

12:37 pm on Aug 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

One thing I forgot: If the site that's linking me back sends enough traffic, I don't care about PR passed :)

So it always depends ...

Btw, yahoo uses another strange format, like
yahoo.com/goodbye/yourURL
(not even consistent, there are parts of the directory which give a plain link).

What's really interesting is that Googlebot crawls the yahoo links anyway, and they even count as backlink.

nakulgoyal

4:28 pm on Aug 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

Well, if you don't care about PR and just want traffic, let him link to you the way he wants. Doesn't bother you anyways. It's just for the web server logs.

hostlead

4:55 pm on Aug 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

nakulgoyal why would you not care about PR?

HostLead

dirkz

5:07 pm on Aug 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

Why do you care for PR?

Because it means visitors who searched for your keywords. If you can get that traffic without gaining PR, I would just take it, too.

Napoleon

5:40 pm on Aug 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

>> Napoleon
will SE spiders including google, crawl through a link like this and find my site? <<

I've not checked it, but Google did specifically address PHPnuke a couple of years ago in terms of crawling (see comments from GoogleGuy if they have not been deleted, within which he mentions that script as something they looked at).

Wired Suzanne

9:14 am on Sep 12, 2003 (gmt 0)

Dirkz,

You're right I experienced it the hard way.
Now I do not want to make the same mistake again. Does it makes a difference if I add a / or not?
[mydomain.com...] vs [mydomain.com...]

Should there be a difference?

By experience I know G makes a difference between
[mydomain.com...] and [mydomain.com...]

dirkz

9:42 am on Sep 12, 2003 (gmt 0)

http://www.mydomain.com/ vs [mydomain.com<...]
Should make no difference at all (you can test this for yourself by looking at the PR of them for several domains).
What could make a difference with the slash are directories (e.g., [mydomain.com...] vs [mydomain.com...]
Anyone experienced differences?
Btw, I always try to get links to [mydomain.com...] or whatever it is. It has the advantage of not distributing the PR to two URLs. The disadvantage is that your index.html could someday change to index.shtml or whatever, but then you could always install a 301.