Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've been requesting that people who link to my website include?ref=THEIR_SITE'S_NAME in their link to me. It looks like this:
<A HREF = http://www.example.com?ref=SITE_NAME>Example's Site</A>
I include this command to insure that my tracking service can identify the referring website in my traffic reports, even if that site uses frames, etc.
I was wondering, does Google still "count" this as a link to my home page when it determines how popular my site is? Does it ignore the text after the question mark? Should I change my strategy?
Is there a way I can figure this out?
Later,
Brian
[edited by: Woz at 1:21 am (utc) on June 24, 2003]
[edit reason] examplified URL [/edit]
There is a site that I know of that links to us using ?ref=companyname and this link is not counted in Google, well at least it doesn't show up as a backlink. I was curious about this myself, so changed our reciprocal link to include ?ref=mycompany and we are no longer listed in their backlinks. Whether or not it's counted towards PageRank I can't say.
>>Is there a way I can figure this out?
I checked Google to see if the page linking to our site was indexed and PR4 or higher, then checked the cache to be sure our link was on the page before checking our backlinks to see if this link was listed.
Google's backlinks don't seem to be very current/accurate right now so you may want to wait awhile before trying to figure out anything.
There are those around here who will tell you that the?ref=xxxxx links are all unique to one another. Since they all display the same page, they'll be discounted as duplicate pages. Therefore, the backlinks from pages that link with these unique URLs are discounted as well.
Makes sense to me. How would google know the difference between this usage of a query string parameter and one used for a dynamic site where the pages really are unique?
The other thing that I've learned recently is that you MAY be able to resolve this with a 301 permanent redirect. According to a few posters here, Google will follow and associate backlinks to the destination page of a permanent redirect (301), but not a temporary redirect (302).
You can use PHP and CGI to perform server-side redirects after you log the referal. Or, if you don't care about processing the parameter you can use Apache's mod_rewrite module. If you use a 301 redirect, theoretically google will use the destination of that redirect as the page that gets indexed and credit for PR.
I don't yet have first-hand knowledge of this, but have been reading about it and would appreciate any clarification.
I'm concerned about using a 301 redirect and how proxy servers and user agents (browsers) might treat this. According to the http specification, the destination page may be cached for a url that is permanently redirected. If this is the case, the original URL may not always be referenced on a clickthrough. If PR is more important than your referal tracking, then this is ok. There are "nocache" headers that supposedly prevent this. But software developers don't necessarily follow specifications to the letter.
I'd also appreciate any authoritive info on this.
