Back links: Does Google like dynamic back-links?

Does links with"?" in them get disregarded by Google

[wine_guru]

Hi - can anyone help?

We have a number of web sites linking to us that link using the "?" character in their code.

Am I correct in thinking G can't, or doesn't like, crawling these? If this is correct is there a way to let G crawl them?

If Google can't crawl them does anyone know if this would affect our sites general appeal to G - would they rate us less highly because of these links perhaps?

It's all a bit confusing, so I'm very grateful for all help/input! I'm on a steep search engine learning curve here..

Cheers, and thanks in advance.

Andrew

[tenerifejim]

Google crawls pages with the "?" operator. It recognises each different URL as a different page. Whether these are as important as files with simply a .htm or .html suffix is open to debate.

[billygg]

yes, google definitely crawls dynamic pages, just a matter of how long the query string is. Ive seen as many as 3 parameters deep, and it still crawls it no problems. Now page rank is a diff story, parameters make a big diff when PR comes into play, from what ive seen.

[wonderbread]

I think that in the post Austin SERPS Google may be having a easier time nabbing pages with variables being passed through the url string. I had never been able to get a large number of pages that use a '?' in the url indexed....and then BAM! post Austin, pretty much all my pages like this got indexed. No changes in the PR or number of backlinks.

Definately one of the positive things to come out of Austin (in my humble opinion).

Nick

[Trisha]

I've got a similar situation. I just got a link from a page that isn't indexed (TB all grey, and it's not a new page). The url of the page is an asp page with one '?' and two '&' like: '.?page=2&category=3&phrase='. I'm pretty sure the query string is the only reason its not being indexed. I checked within the head tags and didn't see anything wrong, and also checked the robots.txt file and didn't see any sign of googlebot being banned. The page is two links away from a PR 7 page, which has no query string. The page in between the PR7 page and the one my link is on is also greyed out and has a query string.

I think there is a decent chance I could get some good traffic from the link, but it sure would be nice to get some PR too, especially since my site is new.

Would it help for me to link to the two greyed out pages from another site of mine? And if that gets the page spidered, would it only have PR that was passed to it from my site? Or would googlebot then follow the links on those pages to the PR7 and go back again?

[uripides]

Hi, I was reading this post and it seems a bit confusing.
According to google's own rules located here
[google.com...]
They stop at a "%", "?" or any character that isn’t a standard ASCII character. As well as this site, [spider-food.net...] explains the same kind of logic.

However, there are ways around this depending on what server OS you are using. Apache has a mod called mod_rewite that will turn your dynamic URL into a static one that a bot can read, located here: [httpd.apache.org...]

Then again its tuff to get just one opinion on this subject.

Cheers-

U

[Trisha]

I thought Google had taken that information off their site and that they now were supposed to follow these kinds of links. I could have sworn GoogleGuy even talked about it once here, saying they now preferred people leave the query string in because they wouldn't have a problem spidering it. But that is still the only reason I can think of that the two pages I mentioned are not being indexed.

[kaled]

I have pages indexed of the form index.html?page.html. These are the result of external backlinks.

I would prefer to not have such urls indexed but they most definitely are.

Kaled.

[uripides]

hmm.. Well it seems there is a difference in opinions as far as SEO goes. I do know that Overture/inktomi and others do not index "%","?" and other cgi related characters. But if getting your PR is really important to you why take a chance, use a mod_rewrite to conform you links to something you know all SE can appreciate.

[Trisha]

But if getting your PR is really important to you why take a chance, use a mod_rewrite to conform you links to something you know all SE can appreciate.

In my case it is not pages of this type on my site that I want to be indexed, its pages on a site that is linking to me.

[tenerifejim]

My own website has up to three parameters beyond the '?' Most of these pages are spider extrmely well and show up in competitive areas on G top three. They just don't show a big page rank (in the toolbar). I don't think this is really an issue at all any more.

[oodlum]

The link at the bottom of every page here at WW:

[westhost.com...]

Although I can't seem to find any backlinks from WW to westhost listed with Google.