Directory URL with "?il=1" Appended

Drops the PR on Directory Page

[rmjvol]

I've recently noticed that when naviagting to a Google Directory page, the url occasioanlly has these 5 characters appended to the end:
?il=1

It seems to only be added when you select the category path for a page from the Google SERPs. It does not occur when you drill thru the Directory nor when you select the Category button from the Toolbar.

The net effect seems to be a reduction of 4 PR points by the Toolbar on cat pages that normally show a PR5,6, or 7. Once cat I checked dropped from a PR4 to a PR1.

Is this a recent occurence or did I just notice some old news? Any significance to this?

rmjvol

[ciml]

Those URLs are presumaby for tracking purposes.

The PageRank reduction is the Toolbar guess for pages that are not in the index. You need to remove the '?il=1' to get the PageRank.

[lazerzubb]

I think they use this only to track how many people who clicks on the directory links on the normal serp's, it may also be a way for Google to stop spidering of their serp's, so that the spiders that doesn't follow the Robots.txt standard and keep spidering the serp's anyway, might get a problem with spidering the directory due to the? in the url.
But in the form of inbound links it doesn't matter, since when google spider their own directory the, spider go to directory.google.com and spider from there.

[rmjvol]

Has it been there for awhile? Or is it recent?

[lazerzubb]

i think i've seen it for almost 3 months now (not surtain though)

[rmjvol]

Thanks. Late nites make you wonder if you've been overlooking something that's old. I was worried I was having a caffine deficiency problem.

[Brett_Tabke]

Where does that come from though? Is that in the search within the directory?

[nipear]

if you click on the category below a search result in google you see it.