What page indexed?

[Regent]

Suppose I link with some sites, and on the link partners' sites they link back to mine with a?VAR in the href, something like:

<a href="http://www.example?VAR>

where each link partner has a different value for VAR. My questions are:

1) Does my home page [example.com...] get the credit for the link
2) Or does the home page with the variable get credit for the link
3) Will search engines index the url with the variable? So if I have let's say 100 link partners, all 100 versions of my home page become indexed?

[edited by: pageoneresults at 2:53 pm (utc) on Sep. 15, 2004]
[edit reason] Examplified URI References [/edit]

[bakedjake]

1) Does my home page [example.com...] get the credit for the link

Generally no.

2) Or does the home page with the variable get credit for the link

In most cases, yes.

3) Will search engines index the url with the variable? So if I have let's say 100 link partners, all 100 versions of my home page become indexed?

Yes, and filtered out by the dupe filter.

[edited by: pageoneresults at 2:54 pm (utc) on Sep. 15, 2004]
[edit reason] Examplified URI References [/edit]

[Regent]

Thanks. I forgot to mention that if there is a variable in my home page url, then the home page will change slightly depending on what the variable is. So does this mean that all 100 versions of the home page, since they are different, will become indexed and NOT filtered out as dupes? And this means that the search engines will treat each of these pages as different pages so that my real home page, without any variables, does not receive any link popularity from my link partners?

Thanks.

[phaugh]

You would have to change the page so that it is less than 70 to 80% identical just to be sure.

I had two pages I tried the?keyword var on and it screwed up the real page. It took three months to get the page back to normal....lucky for me it was an interior page and didn't affect the sites ranking for the important keywords....but I have yet to get back to my old top spot.