Google PR on pages with "?" and "&" in the URL - Big Implications For Link Buying

I have noticed this phenomena on numerous sites and I am not sure if it is a new thing or not.

When you look at a site with webpages that have ? and & in the URL (see some examples below), I notice that every page shows the same PR as the homepage (even if it is just a single ?). However, google will index all the pages on the site as seperate pages. Is this a problem with google ? It seems that google knows that these are seperate pages, but when it comes to PR distribution it treats them all as the same page.

This has big implications for various things such as link buying / selling / exchanging as the PR shown on a page is just that of the homepage and may bear no relevance at all to the actual PR of the page. Furthermore it would seem that no PR may be passing to the sub pages at all, as it seems that when it comes to PR google just sees each subpage as the homepage with the passing of extra variables.

Here is a classic example of this phenomena


PR 7 (Homepage) - http://www.ezinearticles.com/

PR 7 ( Category Page Example ) - http://www.ezinearticles.com/?cat=Health-and-Fitness:Quit-Smoking

PR 7 (Article) - http://www.ezinearticles.com/?4-Steps-To-Quitting-Smoking&id=185701

 

If I am not mistaken, http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=82644 is different than http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=82643 Each can get higher PR depending upon the number of backlinks pointing to it.

Coming to the point...

http://www.ezinearticles.com/ is PR7

http://www.ezinearticles.com/?cat=Health-and-Fitness:Quit-Smoking is PR4

http://www.ezinearticles.com/?cat=Health-and-Fitness:Quit-Smoking is also PR4

I think you should re-check it.

 

Any url can have PR - it all depends on the number of links pointing at it.

Sometimes toolbar PR shows an inaccurate figure for instance when you are in a webmail account or on a page with a session id in the url. In this case google is guessing the PR based on the script you are accessing and it is ignoring the query parameters.

 

I see PR7 for all pages on ezinearticles.com ? - What do others see??

 

I see PR7 for all the links as quoted.

Toolbar PR is pretty much broken since the BD update when PR4 - PR6 was handed out to lots of new sites that had barely any links. That makes buying links based on PR even more of a gamble that it was previously.

 

You'd better check their PR by using SEOChat's PageRank Lookup tool at http://www.seochat.com

 

I have noticed this as well. I've heard that the toolbar sometimes guesses the pr such as when there is a query string. In the case of webmail having a pr or with those sites with query strings, check google's cache to see which page the pr is referring to. In webmail, often the page that is cached is the login page which is where the pr comes from.

One thing I've noticed within the past month is that checking the pr for links that have query strings using these external pr checkers across datacenters or using a php script to get the pr yields an error. It seems to only happen with pages with query strings. The toolbar still shows a pr but I'm not sure how accurate it is because if you enter the exact url into one of these checkers you won't get a result. Anyone know what's going on here?

 

Hmmm... My script seems to be retrieving the pr for urls with query strings now but not when there is a space or %20 in the url. Maybe it was always like that .

 

Drop the toolbar, it'll drive you nuts!

If you want to check PR, use www.webmastereyes.com

 

seochat.com seems to work fine for this.