Link sites with top ranking programs - do they really pass any PR?

[selomelo]

There are numerous link sites with a ranking software that ranks links depending on the number of visits received from and sent to thetarget links. Some of are are PR7 or PR8 sites.

The usual link pattern is as follows:
site.com/cgi-bin/rankingprogram/out.cgi?id=userid

When a user clicks on the link, the ranking program redirects the user to the corresponding site.

I noticed also that some such sites use Pragma "no-cache" tag.

Do such pass any PR to the linked sites at all? Do they have any value in terms of SEO?

[jetteroheller]

One of my internet promotion clients had about 2003 to 2004 several links from an important German newspaper, but the link was like

http://newspaper.com/cgi-bin/redirect?target=example.com

No PR was passed. Very frustrating, we tried several times to get a real link, but the people there had been to stupid to realize the difference.

<edit reason - delink the example url>

[edited by: tedster at 1:52 am (utc) on Aug. 15, 2006]

[jay5r]

The whole point of those CGIs is to not have identifable links to other sites and probably to track the number of referrals they were doing to other sites. They might even be designed so that if a spider requested the URL they send back a 404 instead of a 302/301 - you'd have to test to find out.

These days you could probably do a rel="nofollow". The effect is probably the same, though with the CGI the webmaster has greater control.

So, its unlikely any PR is passed with CGI-based links.

[loudspeaker]

So, being listed in Yahoo! directory is meaingless as well? Yahoo has the following link stucture:

http://rds.yahoo.com/A_BUNCH_OF_PARAMETERS/**http%3a//www.example.com/

[edited by: tedster at 1:53 am (utc) on Aug. 15, 2006]

[Bewenched]

I was wondering about the wierd linking in yahoo myself,

http://rds.yahoo.com/A_BUNCH_OF_PARAMETERS/**http%3a//www.example.com/

I thought it may be a way that they are disgusing paid search results that show up in the results vs the natural results.

[edited by: tedster at 1:53 am (utc) on Aug. 15, 2006]

[jay5r]

Well, I changed my Firefox user agent string to 'Googlebot' and tried the links in the Yahoo! directory and didn't have any problems. So unless they're blocking Google by IP address (which is completely possible since they're competitors), I'd guess Google is crawling the site and making the most of it. Given the importance of the site, if I were Google I'd make sure Yahoo!'s implementation didn't get in the way of getting the links.

But who knows about smaller sites and other implementations of CGI-based redirects...

[jay5r]

I did a little more investigation. If you load pages from dir.yahoo.com with a user agent of 'googlebot' you don't see the redirect script, you see a normal link (and they remove the header on the pages).

Likewise, if you look at the robots.txt file for rds.yahoo.com (where redirect script is located), all URLs are disallowed.

So Yahoo! actually streamlines the process for robots. What they want to track are real people who are being redirected...

So yes, you do get PageRank from a Yahoo! listing...

[loudspeaker]

Thanks for doing this research!

You also mentioned "nofollow". Are you using it? I am debating (with myself) whether I want to use it on ALL external links or not use it at all.

The argument "for" is basically that if it really does what it's advertised to do (stops passing on the rank), I see no legitimate reason why I wouldn't want to - basically, for all sites I am linking to. On the other hand, I do not want to imply in any way that they are spam sites or anything like that..

What are your thoughts on using nofollow on "legitimate" links?

[tedster]

I would not do it myself. The purpose of the rel="nofollow" attribute is to say "I don't vouch for these sites". If I intentionally give a site a link, then I want them to get the "love" too.

My personal opinion is that hoarding PR by placing the rel="nofollow" attribute on every outbound link is one potential flag for over-optimization, if not now, then soon.

[loudspeaker]

P.S. I apologize for not doing a forum-wide search on the "follow" topic first. There are dozens of threads on this site about nofollow. However, as far as I can tell, the jury is still out....

[3bees]

Its also worth noting that the PR issue is often a 2 way street - where the link back to the reciprocating site is something like

site.com/cgi-bin/rankingprogram/in.cgi?id=userid

so you don't pass PR back but they will often rank your site wrt the amount of traffic you send back so if you send more you get more back the higher you are in the list - same principle as to why you want to link high in a search engine

even giving them straight text links is ok if your traffic can be counted and your site listed prominently on their site - as the more traffic they get the more traffic you get - if they get extra traffic from the SE from text links then you will see it ultimately can be quite effective