When is a link a link?

[teylyn]

Hi all,
I'm trying to figure out how a link must appear in a directory or other collection to be recognisable as a link to my site at all. Recognisable to the search engines that keep track of links into my website that is.

I have submitted to a number of directories and see that on some their "link" to my site looks something like this: [theirwebsite.com...] This will take you to my web site all right, but would a spider crawling this directory recognise that it is a link to my domain?

Does that entry have the same effect on my web site's visibility than a link to [mydomain.com...] would have?

If I were to conduct a linkdomain:www.mydomain.com on yahoo or a link:www.mydomain.com or a @www.mydomain.com etc. on google and co., would the link with the jump.cgi have any chance of being discovered by the search engines?

I don't know much about the guts of dynamic web site programming, so I wonder what gets picked up at all.

Anyone?

[andyp77]

I have the same issue. I'm no expert, but from what I can gather the crawlers will not pick up the 'dirty' links as being a part of your domain. That means those links probably don't count towards your pagerank.

You guys must correct me if I'm wrong :)

[Milamber]

To my knowledge the link will not be counted as it is going through a redirect and therefore cannot be followed by the spider.

[jkroeis]

A dynamic link does not count in the search engine and you does not get a better page rank of course! Its only static links as far as I know...

[larryhatch]

What is/was even worse, is the jump.cgi?ID=1234 may well lead to a "302 redirect".

Not only does the perpetrator hog PR, his site gets credit for your content!

Only after a long and furious discussion did Google guy respond
indicating that G is doing something about 302s. -Larry