pagerank and tracking URLs

[farside847]

I have a quick question...

If a site links to my site with a tracking URL like
this: www.mydomain.com/?source=SourceName will this
link be included in the pagerank calculation for the
main site www.mydomain.com?

Or do only links like www.mydomain.com be used to calc?

thanks!

[ncsuk]

Farside

That link would basically pull up your index page and so yes it would count.

A basic rule to follow is that anything after a? is generally ignored by most SE's so you can put anything after and it is useless.

This is why database driven sites have such a hard time getting rankings because most pages are

ppl.php?cat=4&name=bob
ppl.php?cat=5&name=wilma

Problem with these? They are both ppl.php so they will only get the rankings of the main ppl.php page.

Confused? It's a nightmare but quite easy to grasp and build work arounds on.

[TheWebographer]

You can create a database driven site that has search engine friendly URL's

Like:

www.xyz.com/news/old-man-of-the-mountains/

instead of

www.xyz.com/news?story=old-man-of-the-mountains

To do this requres you to edit an .htaccess file on Apache but it is not difficult.

In addition, I notice the search engines are getting better with any kind of URL.

[woop01]

I thought it would count too but for some reason links to www.mysite.com/index.asp?source=example don't show up when I run a link:www.mysite.com. I don't know if Google counts the PR or not but it sure doesn't show these PR 4 links in a link:www.mysite.com check.

[ulounge]

Woop I believe you have to use
www.mysite.com/?source=example
instead of
www.mysite.com/index.asp?source=example