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If we can put aside the question for now of whether or not PR matters, how much PR might be leaking and whether I am screwing over the people who I am linking to, I have a thought for how I can reduce this PR leak effect and wanted peoples opinions on it.
Each external link already goes through a redirect page with a 301 header. This redirect page is excluded under robots.txt.
However, this apparently does not stop Google from crediting this redirect page with a little PR - the very PR which could be recycled back into meaningful pages on the site - even though it can't grab content for the page.
As such, I wanted a method to somehow get use out of all this "phantom" PR that is assigned to pages that will never get any SE traffic and could be put to better use.
I considered a return link on the redirecting page and a javascript redirect but this seems to scream spam, and should probably be avoided.
So I wondered if I could do something with cookies - as googlebot apparently pretty much ignores cookies due to being spidered from multiple IPs and an inability to manage cookies as part of the spidering process.
The idea was that users are given a permanent cookie when they access the site (from any page). If this cookie exists when the redirect page is accessed, then it will pop a 301 header to redirect to the intended target. If a cookie is not present, then present a little page that includes links back into the main site - plus a link to the target.
This means that googlebot will see the second page and will count the links back into the site as valid backlinks with a little PR. The link to the target site still exists though and so the page is perfectly usable for those with cookies disabled.
However, anyone prepared to accept a cookie from the site will never have to see this redirect page and so it won't slow up their browsing experience.
This will not totally eliminate the PR leak of course, but the more links back to the site that are presented on the redirect page, the more the PR leak effect will be diluted.
Anyone feel I am missing something here or should this work as I wish?
You could do that before you implement the scheme.
Or, if you feel lucky (but turn out not to be), ask them after a competitor submits a spam report, and you are investigating a penalty.
