PR and Querystring

/?what=widget is different...

[joker197cinque]

We all know that a link on a PR7 page rocks.

I wonder if

www.example.com (ex. PR7)

and an URL like:

www.example.com/?what=widget (in toolbar PR is always 7)

would kick links the same way.

My experiments say no, and you?

Regards.

[edited by: ciml at 4:49 pm (utc) on Dec. 10, 2004]
[edit reason] Examplified [/edit]

[joker197cinque]

Please, nobody has ever thinked about it?

Am i the only "crazy" :-)

Regards.

[jaffstar]

www.example.com/?what=widget (in toolbar PR is always 7) would kick links the same way.

By kicking, do you mean passing Pagerank?

Sometimes "?" in Urls can be a problem WRTO getting indexed in Google. If the site you are talking about has PR7, then it is getting indexed and it does have PR, which means it should not have any problems passing it out.

[lost in space]

This concept intrigues me (as does any notion of a fresh idea to get higher rankings), but I don't fully understand your theory - please elaborate… Please provide an example how this would be implemented in real practice.

[badtzmaru]

I believe that www.url.com and www.url.com/?paramlist are treated as two distinct pages for the purposes of PR calculation. Furthermore, I believe that every combination of paramlist is considered a unique page. The toolbar, on the other hand, seems to strip the paramlist off and shows only the PR of the un-parameterized URL.

[steveb]

www.example.com/?what=widget

The toolbar PR for pages like that usually/often means nothing in terms of accuracy.

[londoh]

I posted a couple of weeks ago about having dropped to page 2 for most phrases that one of my sites had previously ranked pos 1 - 5 for.

A couple of weeks prior to the drop some messed up code put the session id into the url for a few days:

[www...]

instead of using cookies as previously.

Now, a search such as this:
site:www.mysite.com somepage.html

produces exactly 51 listings each, for 100's of pages. One is a complete listing, the others are URL only like this:
www.mysite.com/somepage.html?sess_id=blahblahblah

if it is the case that

every combination of paramlist is considered a unique page

might this, and/or a dup content problem be the reason for the drop in rankings?

[fusioneer]

See discussion about duplicate content in this thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]

As SteveB says - the PR you see in the toolbar is misleading for the /? format URL's - although it shows the same PR as homepage it is not accurate. It seems as if the toolbar incorrectly assumes it is calculating PR for the homepage rather than a new unique URL.

I know in our experience we had a number of /? format URL's indexed on one site, and they caused the site to drop out of top 1000 results (from 1op 5). Removing these URL's from Google's index caused the site to return. (method is listed in thread above)

If you have a number of /? format URL's all pointing to the same page with the same content this will of course trigger duplicate content filter, and this can have nasty results in our experience. It is better to have one URL indexed and ranking well than 100's ranking poorly.

[joker197cinque]

I know in our experience we had a number of /? format URL's indexed on one site, and they caused the site to drop out of top 1000 results

What?

You mean that I have to IMMEDIATELY rewrite my urls?

Anyone has this idea/experience?

Regards.

[fusioneer]

Read this whole thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]

It depends...if you are using /? style URL's to serve different content for each string passed, you might be OK.

The danger is when Google sees the same page and pings you for duplicate content. I would NOT recommend it as a way to get "unlimited" keyworded URL's into Google, all pointing to your homepage - this will backfire.