Google and CGI, ASP & PHP

How does Goolge handle links to CGI scripts?

[thepcstore]

Hi.

I have several links to CGI applications written in Perl, but have some confusion about how Goole handles the links to these.

In some posts, people seem to think that Google dislikes links with a '?' in, such as filename.pl?user=1234, and won't follow the links. However, the Spider Simulation [searchengineworld.com] shows that these links will be indexed.

The reason for needing to know is that I'm creating a link exchange program which counts inbound links, which is also a way to increase our page rank - but if a website site has a link to mysite.com?linkex.pl?refer=12345 and this isn't going to count, I'll have to work on other ways to log things...

Thanks, Steve.

[Dreamquick]

The googlebot *will* follow links with variables as part of the querystring *but* it will only follow them if that have a small number of variables (ie one or two) as a large number of variables could be indicative of a site which is retrieving a lot of its data from a database.

Also unless you have a high enough page rank it will not follow further links with querystrings from the initial querystring'd page.

Really each of these measures protect you and the googlebot - it doesn't want to have to spider lots of dynamic (and therefore potentially volatile data) and also if it did spider lots of truly dynamic pages this it might put quite a load on a site which wasn't really designed to be accessed like that.

- Tony