Which URLs will benefit you as a link?

and which are tricks to avoid passing PR etc?

[fom2001uk]

I've noticed more and more sites are not linking with straightforward HTML. For example, About.com uses the following to link to sites :

[gouk.about.com...]

That looks to me like it might not be picked up by Google as a referring page. If so, About.com is maybe a lot less valuable a directory to be listed in.

Another one I've seen is :

www.linkingsite.com/cgi-local/proc/proc.cgi?99

that also looks dodgy and I'm sure there are many variations.

What's going to work for you, as far as PR and linking benefit goes, and which are to be avoided like the plague?

Let's put a list together. Link Development is hard enough without these barriers being put up, intentionally or otherwise.

[pixel_juice]

These types of links are used so that it is possible to track clickthroughs and other information - it's not usually anything to do with PR.

Google can follow many of these types of links, provided that there are not too many variables in the url.

Webmasterworld, for instance, uses this type of linking system, and its links do show up in a google backlink sarch.

[buckworks]

About.com links to an article of mine and the link sends nice traffic but I've never seen it in my backlinks on any SE.

[pixel_juice]

About.com disallows external links via robots.txt, so the linking method is irrelevant in this particular case.

[fom2001uk]

Interesting.

So About.com is still worth submitting to; it just won't boost your search engine listings?

[pixel_juice]

>>it just won't boost your search engine listings?

I don't think it's a simple as that. If you get a high traffic About link, more people will pick up on your site, and more links will occur 'naturally'. Success breeds success, and in the case of About.com (even though it depends a great deal where you are listed as to whether you get any traffic) I think the benefits do not come down to instant recognition in a Google link count ;)

[fom2001uk]

Fair points.

The upshot is that About.com stays on the "must do" list of directories :-)

[pixel_juice]

A quick addition on the original post.

if you are doing link exchanges, you may find people who use complicated urls for the sole purpose of preventing them from being indexed, and because of 'PR-obsession'. I tend to avoid linking to and from these sites. I don't think they're playing the game.

To evaluate a redirected link (from a search engine perspective) I would do two things - run in through the server header tool [webmasterworld.com], and check a search engine to see if existing links show up for other sites.

[georgeek]

About.com disallows external links via robots.txt, so the linking method is irrelevant in this particular case.

Are you sure pixel_juice?

See message #6 in this thread here [webmasterworld.com].

[pixel_juice]

>>Are you sure pixel_juice?

Pretty sure ;)

In About.com's robots.txt there is this line:

Disallow: /gi/

External links are all called from files in that directory, so, unless I am missing something obvious, these links will not be indexed by search engines.

I was unable to find that thread earlier btw - thanks :)