Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I'm fairly new to SEO and I've done a good amount of searching on this and haven't been able to find a good answer. I'm hoping someone will clear it up for me.
Suppose that I have a scenario where a directory site, <snip>, uses a link <snip> that goes to a page on their site which does a meta refresh with 0 delay to my site.
Is the directory page passing PR and is it counted as a backlink by google? Would these backlinks be visible in google's webmaster tools?
[edited by: lawman at 4:32 am (utc) on Dec. 14, 2009]
[edit reason] No URLs Please [/edit]
In general I would class links that go via a redirect into two types :
Ai) where your url is present in the url (as in the example you gave)
Aii) where it's not but your url is the linked text
B) where your url is not in the <a> tag
From what I've seen Google counts A; I doubt it counts B.
One way to test yourself is to get such a link and then see if it shows up in your Webmaster Tools inbound links (IBLs). This isn't a great test because WMT doesn't show you all your IBLs, and it also shows you 'nofollow' links.
But if you get a few such links and see any of them in WMT that would at least tell you that Google identifies them as links. Whether it counts them or passes PR through them is another matter.
