Stopping PR leak to other pages - does this redirect work?

[Patrick]

I'm using this (eg) link code in my pages:

wwx.mysite.com/visit.php?linkpage

visit.php is a file which refers to a text file where the actual URLs linked-to are placed (like so: linkpage|actual_url.htm), and the text file is blocked from crawlers with robots.txt.

I thought this would prevent any PR leakage. Now when I search Google (or Yahoo) for allinurl:mysite.com I see URLs like this listed within the SERPS:

wwx.mysite.com/visit.php?linkpage

This is obviously the same link code I'm using. Does anyone know why the search engine would index the link code? I'm hoping this doesn't leak any PR, but I'm not sure. Am I passing PR somewhere?

[Grumpus]

Google has been experimenting with this. The answer is - yes, it may leak sometimes, but so far, not all the time. I'd imagine that the goal is to eventually start following this kind of link more and more frequently.

G.

[compar]

PR leakage is a bit of a fallacy. It is techincally possible because the more out bound links you have the less PR you pass to all pages you link to. As a consequence your internal pages have less PR to pass back to you. But you would have to have hundreds of out bound links before you would see any real difference.

And besides that you are stealing or robbing PR value from everyone you link to. To me that just doesn't seem fair.

And then in the end what good does it do your page anyway. The PR value has little or no direct relationship to where the page is placed in the SERPs.

The whole excercise is a fools game. Google has already said they will start spidering and following Javascript links. It won't be long before the can follow PHP links.

Google wants honest linking. They use links for measuring relevancy and if they can't read the links it hurts their ability to index pages properly.

I say stop trying to hide links. There is very little if anything to gain and it just screws up the way the Internet is supposed to work.

[ferret77]

Why are so worried about passing PR anyway,

I have sites with tons of outgoing links wich rank fine

I think that PR leakage stuff is a bunch of BS

[Patrick]

Thanks for the answers. My question was a technical one rather than the rights and wrongs of passing PR. As it happens, I see nothing wrong with distributing my PR as I choose between my own pages, neither do I see anything wrong with not wanting to pass even a small amount of PR to someone who chooses not to link back to my page - it's their choice, and if they link to me properly, I will do the same.

It's true that it's diffcult to see any real effect of PR on the SERPS of a page, but I presume it has some effect worth having.

Returning to the more interesting technical point, I'm still curious to know how I could leak PR to an URL contained in a text file that is blocked with robots.txt.

[scisoft]

Hi.

I am not sure if I understand your method completely. Is it that you have a different links to visit.php, eg.
visit.php?linkpage1
visit.php?linkpage2
....

parse txt file with links
and then use header: location ??

You probably assume that you are not leaking GPR to visit.php?... since this is a dead end page?

If all this is correct and you still see problems, do not store the urls in the txt file, but use database.

I believe that managing GPR is legal and I will implement a similar system just to handle GPR distribution over my own site.

[Patrick]

That's more or less how I'm doing it. I've come to the conclusion that PageRank is being passed out of the page which contains the link, most likely to the php file, and doesn't go to the actual URL linked-to. Where I used the redirect for internal links I've replaced it with normal html links for the time being.

I'm coming to the conclusion that the only way to stop passing out PageRank is to block the page with the link with robots.txt, or at least to place the links on a page with low PageRank, (or use JavaScript, which I don't want to do).

[MadHatter]

As has been said, just link directly, it is only fair... otherwise people just start screwing over how PageRank works.
People wont be to happy linking to you if you screw them out of some PageRank in return!

[pcarlow]

What about this? Do you think this will work?

[code:1:70525f5f3f]
<form name="myform1" onclick="window.open('http://www.widgets.com'); return false;">
<a class="MyLink" href="javascript:document.myform1.submit()" onmouseover="window.status='Widgets'; return true" onmouseout="window.status=' '; return true">Widgets.com</a>
[/code:1:70525f5f3f]