Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Please don't split hairs on PR vs TBPR. What I'm aiming at is: Under what circumstances does a "dynamic" URL receive a pagerank "of its own?."
For instance, if I check my stats at my hosting-company, they "seem" to have a TBPR of 6. The URL is something like www.myhostingcompany/stats.php?customerid..... This value obviously shows the stats-page itself, and not my individual customer-result-page, thus for google's index and PR-assignment is presumably cut after the "?"-sign.
On the other hand, from time to time I see some well-programmed directories or commercial-sites showing up in the serps, which obviously managed to get their categories and landing pages indexed, although they SEEM to be dynamically generated.
Another example would be our individual profile-pages here in webmasterworld. Mine "seems" to have a PR4. What does your page show?
Researching on this issue, I came across two major hints:
1) Really, really, really take care you don't run into a duplicate content filter, because e.g.
www.mydomain/shop?cat=wodgets&prodid=4711 and
www.mydomain/shop?prodid=4711&cat=wodgets
are two different locators but in most systems will throw out the same result.
2) Matt Cutts somewhere recons not to use more than two get-paramaters (?)
Is there anything else you may like to add on this issue? What role do backlinks play? If I google for "profile mynickname site:www.wemasterworld.com" my profile-page is not listed, so I assume it is not indexed separately. Do you think I might "force" it into google's index by setting some deep-backlinks to this particular URI?
...PR-assignment is presumably cut after the "?"-sign
I've seen some of those spurious PR numbers too, Oliver. I think it's just a glitch in the Google PR server and not an indication of genuine PR for those urls. It's very unlikely that the url would be truncated for real PR assignment. This is a reporting bug, the same way that PR gets assigned apparently to a private email in some cases.
Whether a url includes an obvious dynamic query string or not doesn't matter. The PR equation regarding backlinks is what holds up. Google may be doing some kinds of things to try to alleviate the challenges involved, some of which you've mentioned.
But the bottom line is to keep a tight rein on your query string urls - or your rewritten dynamic urls. They can each get their own PR score and you don't want a bunch of duplicate urls muddying the picture,or splitting up the PR and link juice.
