Can Google Optimizer redirect hurt organic rankings?

[goubarev]

We are started using the Google Optimizer (from Adwords) on one of our sites. But I'm affraid that using it will damage the natural ranking.

The home page of our site (index.php) has the PR4 and comes up first on very competative search term in natural results. However, with Optimizer running when going to our website like this:
http://example.com/
it redirects to
http://example.com/index1.php
(that's the "optimized" version of home page - and this page doesn't have the PR at all)

I'm not sure what kind of redirect it is, but I assume it's some javascript.

I've searched the Google help for this:

Will using Website Optimizer affect my search ranking?

Website Optimizer is designed to keep your original content visible in the HTML source code of your page at all times. As a result, your original content is visible to crawlers, which means there should be no major impact on search engine ranking. However, if you implement changes to your content after using Website Optimizer, they'll have the same effects as any content changes that you would typically make to your website.

But this answer actually bothers me. Since it answers nothing about PR. As far as I understand the page A that redirects to page B will eventually get the page B's PR? (That's how Google bombing works?)
So, if I keep it as is.. will my home page loose it's PR4 and adopt the No-PR of index2.php?

Please advise

[tedster]

Googlebot is not javascript enabled, so there can be no indexing of the javascript redirected url. Googlebot acts likea browser with javascript turned off, so this answer from Google applies:

What will users see if they have JavaScript disabled?

If your site's visitors do not have JavaScript enabled in their browsers, they will see your original page content. Your original content still exists on the page during the experiment; it's just surrounded by JavaScript tags that signal Website Optimizer to replace the content with variations to users who do have JavaScript enabled.

[google.com...]

You have no worries here, so don't let the various types of redirects get blurred in your thinking. Only your original page is spidered and indexed while you test revised pages with the Optimizer.