301 Redirect and PR Problem

[Jhet]

Here is my problem. I have site1 that redirects to site2. Site1 originally had a PR of 5. For a while when you went to site1 it would redirect you to site2 and I'd still have the PR of 5. Now it has a PR of 0. Which leads into this...

I have a page showing up for site1 for a search for 'xyz' but instead of the url showing as the site1 page it shows up like this: www.example.com/?www.evilsite1.tld It still redirect to site2 but all the PR appears to be associated with evilsite1 instead of site2. By the looks of evilsite1 I would not think that it would have any PR at all.

WTH?

[edited by: tedster at 4:59 pm (utc) on Jan. 3, 2009]
[edit reason] use example.com [/edit]

[tedster]

When the evil site shows up in a query string, that url is still part of your domain, not part of the evil site. There's no "stealing" of your PR here, as long as you don't link to the evil site.

[Jhet]

Thank you for the reply and post update tedster.

By stealing the PR I mean my site went from a PR 4 to a PR 0. The other site was a PR 4 but if you look at the domain it is complete garbage. It is possible they gathered enough links to become a PR 4 but from the look of the site...meh. I also found out that there are other domains (not mine) that the querystring was added to.

After I seen the PR change for my site, I put in a spam report at Google. I don't know if that made any difference but as of last Wed (Dec 31st) the PR for my site was back to 4.

Maybe it was just a glitch. Dunno but it was like that for several days before it was changed.

[ZydoSEO]

I would suggest going to the Google Help Forums where you are allowed to post the URL for you site and get input from contributers there as well.

If your PR dropped from 4/10 to 0/10 then it could be a lot of things. Are you sure that your PR is 0 or is it gray barred (i.e. does Google toolbar say No Pagerank Information Available)?

[Jhet]

I posted in the Google forums after there wasn't an answer here for a couple days. They are the ones who found that the evilsite1 url was appended to other urls as well as mine.

The PR was a 0 and not grey barred for sure. I found it odd that I seen that at all since toolbar PR is not updated very often.