Spidering Capabilities

? = & characters in URL address

[austtr]

I have an opportunity to get a link from an on-topic page where the URL has a format as follows:

www.domain.com/?L=subcategory_names&cat=07&sc=66

Can search engines spiders, and Googlebot in particular, crawl pages with that type of URL. The page shows a PR value so am I correct in assuming that Google must have crawled it to be able to calculate the PR?

I'm sure I've seen questions like this before but danged if I can find them with a search or the FAQ.

[johannes]

PR can be shown for a page that hasn't been crawled.

That url is crawlable without a doubt. But the likelyhood of it beeing crawled is lower if there are many variables. Especially if the variables are of the sessionid type, long random numbers. This url looks ok, but it depends on the rest of the site.

[Sinner_G]

Why don't you just go to google and search for www.domain.com/?L=subcategory_names&cat=07&sc=66? If it show a result, then the page has been crawled, if not, it hasn't (or hasn't made it to the index yet).

[rogerd]

Austtr, the URL is almost certainly crawlable. The page may have lower PR than if it had no query string. Nevertheless, if it's an on-topic link, go for it... it can't hurt, and may well help from a traffic and/or rank standpoint.