Meta refresh?

Will search engines index meta refreshes?

[zoltan]

OK, so here is my doubt. I use some kind of referral tracking to see where are my visitors coming from. Whenever I place a link on another site, I use: www.mydomain.com/?source=otherdomain. Now, I have 2 options with my script:

1. Use perl's print location function to redirect to main homepage (right now I'm doing this).
2. Use a meta refresh to redirect the visitor to www.mydomain.com.

Case 1 which is currently used redirects the visitor to www.mydomain.com but the URL in browser is showing www.mydomain.com/?source=otherdomain (it is some kind of hidden redirecting). No problem with this, however I just noticed that search engines (well ... google...) list my page as www.mydomain.com/?source=otherdomain. By using this method, I will have hundreds of links pointing to my main homepage but all with source=otherdomain1, otherdomain2, etc. I think this is not good because it won't help my PR even if I have hundreds of sites linking to me, google will think they are all different pages.

Now, let's talk about case 2. What if I use a simple meta refresh to redirect the visitors to www.mydomain.com? Will google follow this refresh and count it as a unique link to my main homepage?

Any help is appreciated.