Redirects within same page / duplicate content / parameters and passing link power

[SandisV]

Hi guys, been a while since my last post here, but letting you know I'm all well ;)

I have an interesting question about Google and would like to know your experience or tips...

Basically there is need to link to homepage using various parameters, e.g.:

salespage.com/?source1
salespage.com/?source2
salespage.com/?source3

Question is - whats the best way to ensure that all these links going to the same homepage just with various parameters (for tracking) continue to give maximum link power at the same time would not cause duplicate content.

One of ideas would be to do 301 redirect so whatever is the parameter it tracks it (sets cookie) and then redirects to homepage which is salespage.com in our example.

What I'm worried about is that within same domain I'm looking at 100's of 301 redirects. What's the SES's take on this? Will they count the backlinks? Will they pass PageRank?

p.s. What about using robots.txt to de-listing the ?param pages? This as I understand will leave no benefit from the links nor PageRank?

Any advice/tips are welcome

:)

[SandisV]

Any comments on this one?

[rainborick]

All of those are separate URLs/pages as far as the search engines are concerned. Just because your index.php file contains the script that handles the query string parameters, doesn't mean its a single page to search engines because the query string is a part of the URL. So to pass the full link credit to the main URL, you would have to do a 301 redirect to the main page without any query strings attached.

[SandisV]

Thanks for stepping in - the fact on 301 redirect is fine, as long it is accepted by engines and that the 100 links that points to these pages with ?<params> pages are counted as going to the homepage and anchor text considered as valid - I'm all fine. Just seeking for some confirmation for this that is safe to apply.

[FREE BET]

do a meta 301 redirect for all

[SandisV]

So 301 redirects are safe for solving this type of dilemma?