Has Google changed the way it values indirect inbound links?

[wingslevel]

The Dewey update speculation about linking got me re-looking at all of my competitors backlinks.

It used to be the consensus that links would only be followed (and counted for PR purposes) if they were direct ie href="http://www.example.com"

Has this changed?

The reason I ask is that I have found several links listed by google (using link: for my competitor site) that are definitely indirect - here is the syntax that appeared on one page in question:

href="http://site1.org/link.php/?url=www.site2.com&c=12345"

there is no nofollow...

Could googlebot be clicking on any href or other hot text and then crediting the ultimate resultant page with the link? Wouldn't this apply for affiliate links as well (I didn't see any affiliate links counted, though...)? Affiliate links actually have one more layer in between the linking and resulting page.

[tedster]

Nice catch on that. You got me to look, and I've just found a few, too. In each case the full url was present in the query string, rather than just some scripting variables. That'sprobably an important factor.

Of course, a link: operator report doesn't tell us whether PR is being transferred or not. That looks like something worth testing.