URLs in bulletin board postings.

Is there a limit on how many Google counts?

[Mohamed_E]

On the main hiking board that I contribute to I am very careful not to drop a URL unless it is very relevant to the topic under discussion. I am a good citizen, dislike spammers, and do not wish to be one myself.

Imagine my surprise when I looked at the source and found, at the bottom of each posting by a member who had a web site in his/her profile:

<a href="http://posters.site.com" target="_blank"> 
<img src="images/home.gif" alt="Visit poster's homepage!" ></a> 

Since I know a heck of a lot more about hiking than about search engines, I post quite a bit there (#3 top poster). Does Google in any way discount these multiple links from the board to my site? Most threads have a PR of around 5, that means that if they all count they are supplying over half of my quality links!

[Mardi_Gras]

Have you checked your links to see how many - if any - of those links Google is counting?

If you already know how to do this, ignore the following - but if not, you can check links in Google using the Google toolbar or the "Advanced Search" option on the Google homepage.

[Mohamed_E]

Interesting ...

I knew that Google did not show any links to me from that forum, but since it only shows half my links I thought that it was just hiding them. Still I checked to see if that forum was indexed (site search on toolbar) and found that it was not. I emailed the webmaster asking him why.

But then I went to another forum (that I do not post on) and did some experiments. One poster has over 30 posts (using search forum function), searching for back links to his site showed only 6 from that forum. I then did a Google site search (on the forum) for his name, only got six threads. Note that this forum uses URLs that have '?' in them.

Went to a third forum (also uses '?' in URLs), did a search on a username with forum search function, found about a dozen posts, did Google site search, found one post plus profile.

Not sure whether this is specific to forums, or whether googlebot gets tired of following links with '?' in them and goes home after a few???

edit: fixed typos

[ciml]

> googlebot gets tired of following links with '?' in them and goes home after a few???

That's probably a good description. Google does follow URLs with '?' sometimes, but it is less likely to. PageRank seems to be the main factor.