Building InternalLinks by adding querying string to existing URL's

Building Internal Links with querystring

[vikram lashkari]

hi friends,
I am doing SEO for client websites and while doing SEO i look closely to our competitors and other top SERP's websites in same industry and other industries, what they are doing to make their sites do well.
And while doing that i found one Strange web site 2 years which seems to be doing really great in the "mobile accessories industry" and coming almost top in every SERP's and after studying that site I found that site is following one technique to boost their internal linking in thousands.
Here is what i investigated this website seems to have 9,000 products and when i look in google for site:domain.co.uk i found they have 166,000 pages. and after analysing thoroughly i found that for each single product page they have atleast 10 -12 pages exists with different querystirng pattern.[ I donot know if i can put the link of that site here or not, please if any one confirm that i am ok to put the link of that site for proof reason ,then in next post i will post all the links with core proof]
I donot know if googleguy will read this post or not but this kind of internal linking should be considered as spam. But that is working for that site and it is doing really great since last 2 years. So please if it is legal to put links for sample purpose and for letting other know that if it is safe to do that or not.

Thanks
Vikram

[tedster]

The situation you describe is not uncommon -- but the site you describe is not getting an advantage from it.

Some dynamic sites are configured so that many different query strings are possible in a URI that still resolves to the same page content. Far from giving a site an advantage, in my experience this is a potential liability. If there are too many variations of the query string for the same content, sometimes Google has just given up and the site ends up with NONE of them in the index, leaving few to no URIs in the index at all.

If you examine the site:example.com results for such a domain, you usually will see that most of those variations are either labelled "Supplemental Result" or they are hidden from view until you click on a "Display omitted results" link.

So it is a disadvantage. Much better for any domain if Google only indexes one URI that resolves to each page. That way the PageRank for any bit of content is not potentially split over many URIs and there is nothing to trip off Google's duplicate content detection algorithms.

Also note, the number of pages from a given domain is only an estimate, and sometimes that estimate can be wildly off, especially when the number of indexed pages is higher than 1000.

To sum up, different query strings pointing to the same content is not what is giving your competition an edge -- they are succeeding in spite of it.

[vikram lashkari]

hi tedster,
First of all thanks for your reply. But I can give you the links if you want. Those URL's are having Differnt PR for each querystring and are doing well for building internal linking.
So i am sure they are doing something which i might not been able to investigate but they are definately working on making their internal linking very strong for their website and coming Top in SERP's. If you think you can find out the technique then here is the site <edited>.

Please tedster if you find out the technique please let me know what is making their site to go upto 152,000pages. As i am dam sure they have hardly 9,300 unique product and category.

Thanks
vicky

<Sorry, no urls.
See Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]>

[edited by: tedster at 2:29 pm (utc) on Aug. 9, 2006]

[g1smd]

This type of "duplicate content" will harm the site in the long run.

Multiple indexed URLs for the same content is never a good idea.

[vikram lashkari]

hi g1smd,
Thanks for reply, you seems to be lot senior member and hope you will answer my query. What is the extraordinary thing that you find that this site is doing i mentioned in my above reply.

I mean what makes their keyword up in almost 90% SERPs. It is their meta, internal backklink or their keyword placement in the page or something else.

Thanks

[tedster]

Hello again vicky. We don't do specific site analysis here, vicky, because we don't publish domain names either for our members or for their competition (see the Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]).

The Google algorithm has many many factors in it -- some say over 200. This entire forum is focused on discussions about various areas of the complete ranking algorithm. Many factors have to do with historical strength of the site (the longevity of the domain under its current owner, the longevity, stability and growth of backlinks) and many other signs that Googlers have called "signals of quality". There's a lot to look at -- but we just can't analyze specific domains here -- thanks.

[londrum]

remember too, that there are many legitimate reasons for using multiple query strings on one product.

you might have a site that allowed users to compare one product with another. you could carry the data over to another product page using query strings.

or maybe you've got a search page, where users can say they want to see all the phones with this, that, and the other feature.

sometimes it can be a good idea to use query strings like that, as it allows the user to bookmark the page and come back to it later with it still showing the same results.

[jimbeetle]

remember too, that there are many legitimate reasons for using multiple query strings on one product

Yep, but you must be sure that a search engine bot can see a page as only one url.

[vikram lashkari]

hi friends,
First of all i apologize for giving example with domain name. Now regarding my investigation about building Internallinks with Querystring, i do agree with the drawback of the PR getting distributed but try to understand that the original page with PR -4 or PR-5 still exists and is still linked from few pages but by adding same URL with different Querystring that particular website have managed in building huge backlinks for their rest of the pages through out their website and that is boosting up their SERPs.

So don't you thinking just sharing your PR with your own page for sake of internal backlink is worthwhile. Hope you all will agree with me

Thanks
Vicky

[tedster]

Here's the thing -- Google doesn't assign PR to "a page", it assigns PR to a url. The concept of "page" is merely common language. It's not technical and it can't be defined precisely enough for an algorithm to use in its computations.

If a link uses a different url (and a different query string does create a different url) then that url has it's own battle to fight in the algo, even if it leads to the exactly same content as another url. Rather than being an SEO techinique, this is a flawed website infrastructure.