Google and clickthru scripts

Can / does Google see the target URL?

[PoorOldMe]

Does anyone have any opinion or fact on whether Google can see a clickthru URL or not?

Three examples;
http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/clickthru.cgi?link=http://www.targetdomain.com

http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/clickthru.cgi?link=www.targetdomain.com

http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/clickthru.cgi?link=targetdomain.com

I ask as I use click thru scripts on forums to stop being Spammed for link pop. For this, I use the second example with no "http://" shown for the target (link) domain.

However, I am looking at running a directory, and would like to give the listings on the site the link pop they deserve. Trouble is, you guessed it, all the scripts I like have redirect / clickthru algos for the links.

Any ideas?

[egomaniac]

My understanding is that Google does pass PR through CGI links. I looked into this awhile back and that was the answer I came up with. In my case, I wanted to avoid passing the PR through the link for reasons unrelated to what you are doing. So I went with another method that avoids passing on the PR.

There are more knowledgeable people here than me on this who could comment on the specific variations of each url that you posted.

[Yidaki]

Google follow's such links and passes PR if they aren't disallowed through the robots.txt file.

Big downsites / considerations you should make before building your directory:

- One could steel your compilation if you list the clear full URLs instead of a clickthru.cgi. Believe me, there are allways people that try to steal every bit of your content - especially link collections if they are specialized / niche.

- Think about building a security mechanims that controlls how many links one can get even if you disallow your clickthru.cgi through robots.txt.

- If you allow the script to get crawled cause you want to pass PR to the people be carefull and think twice! Can you allways guarantee that nobody of the listed sites is cheating google or received a penalty? You'd have a lot of frequent work for the future to allways guarantee this!

Tip: only list the top and most valuable sites that you know best with their full clear URL and all others with a clickthru.cgi like link. Disallow the crawling of this cgi.