does link.php?link=1 mess up SE PR?

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blacksnday
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does link.php?link=1 mess up SE PR?

Post by blacksnday »

I have been thinking about using a linking system like the title says
and if Search Engines will properly realize a site is linking to you
considering most sites that use something like link.php?link=1
use header() to forward to the correct url.
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John Cartwright
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onion2k
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Post by onion2k »

I'm sorry .. but that page is complete and utter rubbish.

"Search engine spiders dislike long and ugly URLs. They get indexed from very popular sites, but dealing with small web sites spiders usually don't bother fetching the page."

Excuse me? Search engine spiders will search anything that looks like a valid URL. Put any search you like into Google and look at the pages it returns .. loads of the ones that aren't just the URL have _GET variables attached.

Having a human readable URL is a good idea .. but to suggest search engines won't index it is simply wrong.
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blacksnday
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Post by blacksnday »

I guess I should've narowed my question,
considering most link.php type code uses

Code: Select all

header()
to redirect the user to
the proper link they chose,
will search engines be forwarded like human users are
AND will search engines correctly know that I am linking to you?

doing a simple search of my site in google
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:bas ... rt=20&sa=N
you will see that google DOES index pages with
non-se-friendly urls.
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jwalsh
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Post by jwalsh »

onion2k wrote:
Jcart wrote:Excuse me? Search engine spiders will search anything that looks like a valid URL. Put any search you like into Google and look at the pages it returns .. loads of the ones that aren't just the URL have _GET variables attached.
True, but not entirely. Google is finacky about URL's with a parameter called ID or id. They occasionally will truncate the URL at this point, my guess is to avoid storing sessionid's. They do store some with id, but not all.... I'm not sure what the criteria is.
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