Do dynamic urls bleed PR?

[fishfinger]

I have posted this in another forum too, but I'm trying to get a wide range of views. I'm interested in marked differences in toolbar PR. I know I shouldn't get hung up on it because it's not real and because PR is not held to be important but still!

example 1 : pr6 with 70 category links
These show PR3.

example 2 : pr 6 with 15 category links.
I would expect these to show PR4 but they are PR2.

I know the toolbar isn't true PR and just a representation, but what is more likely here :

(a) it's a glitch in the toolbar, or
(b) the toolbar is reflecting the fact that real PR loss is occuring here

Thoughts?

[edited by: tedster at 3:50 pm (utc) on April 28, 2006]
[edit reason] remove actual domains [/edit]

[tedster]

What you describe does sound odd -- fewer links to target pages "should" result in more PR being voted. Even taking into consideration a "high PR6" for one and a "low PR6" for the other still means this is an odd result.

However, current toolbar PR is quite problematic, so this is not a good time to make a study of anything related to PR. As far as I know, real PR is the same as it always was -- and it involves EVERY link on the page, not just the obvious category links.

Also, just because a link is "dynamic" doesn't mean anything is different, unless the links are unspiderable because they go through some redirect system, javascript or something like that. Then those links will not transfer PR because they are not spiderable and will not be counted.

[caveman]

The OP references dynamic url's in the headline but no examples are given (edited out?), and the post doesn't seem to refer further to the nature of the concern re dynamic url's.

Are the links to one page dynamic, and the other page not?

Are the 70 and 15 category links inbound links to the page, and all internal?

Are those the only inbound links to the pages?

FWIW, though G and the other bots are far better than they used to be at indexing long dynamic URL's with special charactters, they are not perfect at it yet, and I believe have even gone on record as choosing not to crawl certain kinds of strings.

Also, in their guidelines, they very clearly state:

Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.

Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index.

[tedster]

caveman, you bring up an interesting question, unanswered for me at present. If a link goes to a page that Google chooses not to spider/index for some reason (or perhaps it is even 404) does that link still get counted to divide up the amount of PR that gets "voted" to the target pages?

Particuarly with directories where there can be so many outbound links on a page, this might have a noticeable effect, although not from the Home Page.

[fishfinger]

Thanks for the replies guys. Teh urls were edited out. The first example uses static html links. The second uses this format :

index.php?index=directory.inc&cat=02&name=Business&depth=0

unless the links are unspiderable because they go through some redirect system

They are spiderable and being crawled and indexed, so this isn't Google having trouble accessing the content.

There is some PR bleed occuring here for certain, but I can't tell if this is the toolbar reflecting *real* PR loss or if it is a glitch. I now PR is all over the place lately but this is not a new phenomenon.

if a link goes to a page that Google chooses not to spider/index for some reason does that link still get counted to divide up the amount of PR that gets "voted" to the target pages?

I have excluded pages using robots.txt and they are still voted PR according to the toolbar where there is a spiderable link to see.

Perhaps Google is being confused by the variables in the dynamic url and thinks that there are four more times the amount of pages than there are? I am going to see if I can test this to see if rankings/ link weight are effected and will post back my findings.

[g1smd]

You have 4 parameters, using more than 3 is often problematical.

A bigger problem is if you have those parameters in a different order in some links on the site: you then effectively have duplicate content.

Various site:domain.com inurl:name searches will help you check that you have got consistent URL structure for every link on the site.

Run a check using Xenu LinkSleuth for obvious errors too.