Appending tracking code to inbound links

Will this prevent the transfer of page rank?

[Goldilox]

I was recently offered a link from a site with a very high page rank which I am very excited about! However, they cannot hard code my link into the page, and said that they have to append tracking code to the link for their tracking purposes.

Will Google now think that this link is not natural because of the tracking code?

Also, does page rank flow through the link even if there is tracking code in it?

Thanks in advance

[Serpent]

Pagerank won't flow through a link with a tracking code attached to it if it is part of the URI.

example.com/example.html

is not the same as

example.com/example.html?trackingid=5034

Hope that helps!

[ZydoSEO]

Serpent is correct. The search engines will see each unique URL as a different page.

So if you have 5 partners that link to you each with different tracking ids and one partner that doesn't include a trackingid as in:

www.example.com?trackingid=1
www.example.com?trackingid=2
www.example.com?trackingid=3
www.example.com?trackingid=4
www.example.com?trackingid=5
www.example.com

Then the SEs will see those as 6 pages each w/ 1 link, not 1 page w/ 6 links.

[Achernar]

The solution is to redirect urls with a tracking id and remove the id.

[Goldilox]

Thanks guys - replies really useful, just confirmed my suspicions.

[Lord Majestic]

Why won't you use referer to determine where click comes from and maybe save it as a cookie so that all later transactions done will be clearly links to the site from which originally that visitor came from? In this case the link can be exactly the same without any build-in tracking.