OK. I'm still new at the link building game. But I love participating in forums, b/c they drive a lot of traffic my way (mostly from here actually ), and consider it a vital part of my daily marketing efforts. I was posting in some forums at About.com the other day. Yeah, the site sucks for various reasons.... I used to work with them, so I know that. But why not use them and their popularity? (I'm not talking about spamming, but actually getting into discussions and having your links in your sig.) Every single individual post (even my brand new ones) were showing in my toolbar as a PR4 instantly. Seemed weird. If it's as simple as that, why are half of the forums dead? (and every topic's forum I checked showed the same thing) Is there a nofollow on their links? Is my toolbar screwy, and carrying PR from a previous page or something? Or should I keep posting there? I figure it's worth it just for some traffic, if I find topics that are active. But I'll keep starting threads in the more inactive ones too if I'm understanding this correctly and they're really giving PR4 links from each post. They also recently started allowing comments on topic page's blogs, so I've posted a couple. No idea if it's going to help though (and only posting useful things.. not spam). Any clarification?
Look at any forum there. Every About.com site has their own. (They're not easy to find though, you're right... maybe that's why half are dead.) Just browse to any about site... for instance... http://marketing.about.com. If you look in the left navigation column (near the bottom), there's a link to the forums.
The PR in the toolbar is just a guess and ignores a lot of query strings. Thats why you sometimes see PR when viewing your webmail accounts.
For query strings, the toolbar shows the same or 1 PR less than the original page. I'll show you an example... If you see the site www.dublinevents.com [PR 5] and then pass any query string to it (even if the page doesnt exists) www.dublinevents.com/?ok [PR 5] OR www.dublinevents.com/?id=768554543543 (any wierd number) [PR 5], or multiple parameters http://www.dublinevents.com/?id=1&nid=2&sid=7 [PR 5] you'll still see some PR assiged by the toolbar, which shouldnt happen. Its the same thing which happens here on the forums with completely new threads.
Rosie pretty much explained the reason behind that. Google doesn't spider a lot of dynamic links to prevent servers from crashing by having to regenerate so much data for each visitor. It all depends on the coding of the script, like pagination, the amount of resources the server uses, etc. Regardless Google doesn't spider dynamic links as much as static links so therefore they do not have a high pagerank value. That is why a lot of people use mod_rewrite on dynamic pages to make their sites appear as static or giving search engines "permission" to spider their pages normally which is why they appear to have a higher page rank quicker. However sites that have been around for years even with dynamic links sometimes have a somewhat high PR as well. One example I can think of other than my forums that use dynamic links for some pages like the profile edit page, is at www.phpBB.com you will notice that some of their pages have PR5 or more even with dynamic links such as: http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/profile.php?mode=editprofile However at the same time their other pages that are spidered regularly have a PR of 7 or more so that pagerank is transferred to even the dynamic pages as well.