PR related question

[Pebbles]

If someone gives me a text link back to my site and it is in the form of www.widgets.com/?source=XYZ, will the PR be passed on to my regular homepage, www.widgets.com?

Thanx.

[Marketing Guy]

Id say so.

AFAIK a link is a link.

Maybe someone else can confim tho.

Scott

[doc_z]

I think Google could see this as two different pages. If you know a site which is linked in such a way do a backlink search in Google (link:www.widgets.com). If the page linking to that site is shown then Google doesn't distinguish between these pages and PR is transferred.

However, even if Google distinguishes between these pages, a part of the PR is tranferred to your regular pages since the 'new page' www.widgets.com/?source=XYZ is connected to other pages of your site.

[ciml]

www.widgets.com/ and www.widgets.com/?source=XYZ are different URLs, but if they return the same content they should be merged. Whichever URL is kept (probably the one with the best links) will get the PR from both sets of backlinks.

If the content changes between the times that Google fetches the two URLs, then you should get two different (but almost identical) listings. This splits the PageRank, but fortunately Google's results clustering prevents you from having more than two listings from the same domain in the top ten.

<added>
doc_z beat me to it