Hidden Outbound Linking Problem?

Linking to PR0 sites when you believe otherwise

[Thanasus]

I just had a scary experience. I went link hunting and set up some nice, useful, vertical link exchanges with peers. We directly sent HTML to each other. When I checked their sites, they had PRs of 4,5, or 6. However, I was a fool and never clicked on the actual links which I set up.

Now that I have my links page indexed by google for over 3 months, I realized that I am linking to some PR0 pages. How are they PR0? Because the link they sent me doesn't go to the www subdomain. Their subdomain 'http://www.widget.com' has a PR of 5 but the direct domain 'http://widget.com' has a PR0 because of duplicate content. In their haste typing out their HTML link, they left our the 'www'

My question is would google see me linking to direct domains and their PR0? Or would google be smart enough to figure out its the same as the www subdomain? I'm going to assume that google is not smart enough to figure that out.

My advice to others, beware of possible making the same dumb mistake I just did. Luckily, I have yet to incur a penalty for that but it has only been 3 months... <fingers crossed>

[stevenha]

It's very unlikely that the PR0 is a penalty. It probably just indicates that all the other incoming links are going to the www.domain.com instead of domain.com

Maybe the person asking for the link, is purposedly trying to boost PR of domain.com, but more likely, its just a typo, as you suggested.

[rfgdxm1]

? Standard, default practice is to have [widget.com...] and [widget.com...] point to the exact same data. Yes, I know it is possible to set things up so this isn't the case. However, any webmaster who does this is either just clueless or a weirdo. ;) What you are seeing is just a quirk of Google. Has nothing to do with penalties.