PR of pages with querystrings depends on base URL?

High PR for pages with querystrings even though they are not crawled.

[Jalinder]

I have a page search.asp with PR of 6. Search results are of the format search.asp?q=keyword+keyword etc, depending on what keyword user entered to search.

While search.asp is crawled by Google the internal pages i.e. search.asp?q=keyword+keyword are not crawled because such pages are not linked from anywhere in the site.

I am surprised that all these internal pages have a PR of 4, that's what the toolbar shows. So is this PR dependant on the base URL i.e. PR of search.asp?

On the contrary there are pages with format products.asp?product=1 where 1 is id and can be any number. Page content changes depending on id. All these pages have a PR of 0 even as they have many links from within the site and some from other sites. Seems PR0 for all these pages is because products.asp (i.e. the page without querystriing) is not used and so not linked and has PR0.

[g1smd]

The PR shown is a "guess" based on the PR of other nearby pages within the site and/or the PR of the main index page and how many clicks away from it you are.

[Jalinder]

g1smd,
Thanks for the reply. Yes it is clear that there is "guess".

I hope this guessed PR for such pages (pages with querystrings that are crawled and indexed by Google) is not used for ranking as well. Heard there is a separate internal PR for every page.

[Wizard]

As far as I know, the PR is assigned just to base URL, and URLs with query string have the same PR as base URL. If you have noticed something different, I'll be surprised.

The differences you have noticed (search.asp with PR6 and search.asp?... PR4) might be from other reason. Are they both www or both non-www URLs?

[doc_z]

It seems that the URL is truncated after the '?' for the toolbar request. [webmasterworld.com]

[Jalinder]

All my URLs are www. (Any non-www are 301 redirected since couple months).

[Jalinder]

the PR is assigned just to base URL, and URLs with query string have the same PR as base URL.
>> I wonder how that will work with my products.asp example.

[jlander]

I have many pages like that on my site as well. Would there be any good reason to noindex,nofollow those types of pages? Does it help the other pages on the site to have more links (as I use the same site template for most of my pages), or would it be better not to dilute the PR by allowing it to flow to these pages?

[doc_z]

Would there be any good reason to noindex,nofollow those types of pages?

No, I wouldn't do that.

[Jalinder]

Well I guess a good way to find the real internal PR of a page is to add a querystring to it and check the PR.

[Wizard]

Would there be any good reason to noindex,nofollow those types of pages

If they have the same meta title and description and very similiar content, they make duplicate content problems. Usually there are no problems with removing them with URL Console, while saving the base URL, but you have to be cautious and remember that adding 'noindex' tag is allowing your competitor to remove the URL from Google index.

[SebastianX]

> As far as I know, the PR is assigned just to base URL, and URLs with query string have the same PR as base URL. If you have noticed something different, I'll be surprised.

You'll be surprised: that's not true. There are display issues which may in some cases indicate that, but there are tons of dynamic pages out there where the toolbar PR ranges from nil to whatever value, depending on the query string of the same script's file name.

[Jalinder]

SebastianX,
What about the PR displayed for a page with querystring that was never crawled?

PR of [searchmarketing.yahoo.com...] is 7. Say I added my own querystring like this:
[searchmarketing.yahoo.com...]
the toolbar is showing PR of 5. Now this page was never crawled by Google, so how can it show a different PR? I believe it is the internal PR of the base URL. Or may be PR that the base URL can pass.

[SebastianX]

Jalinder, check it right after a toolbar PR update, happening every 3-4 months, for dynamic pages where you know the backlinks. The funny stuff Google shoves into the toolbar pixel widget often has not so much to do with real PageRank. For example there is a difference between scripts which can output indexable content without query string, having inbound links to the naked URL, and scripts which never got linked and/or crawled without query string. Also there are differences depending on the browser. Just don't trust the toolbar pixels more than the million dollar pixel home page for passing of PageRank. I can assure you that each linked dynamic URL has its own (real) PageRank assigned, and that Google does not use the toolbar PR (read: entertainment PR) database for ranking purposes.