Question mark over Page Rank

2004 June 4 at 08:52 » Tagged as :

In many newsgroups and mailing lists an often asked question is "will google index my pages if they have '?' sign in it". If they had read the google documentation before posting the question they would have known that the answer was yes.

However I just get the impression that google has stopped asigning page ranks to such pages. Let's take an example. Asianjuniors03.com is the only site developed by Rad Inks that has a single physical page with other pages being identified by the query string. When you visit the site with a browser equipped with the google tool bar you find that only the home page has a page rank.

That wasn't always so, each page on the site had a reasonably high page rank for such a small site with the home page having a rank of 5. In short the second level pages were assigned a value but they have now been removed.

Now consider this site (raditha.com), all the pages on this site are indexed and all the pages that are older than two months have been indexed. (I have noticed that google now seems as long as 60 days before asigning a page rank for the first time). None of the pages have a query string attached to it. The site is made up entirely of PHP except the blog which is exported as HTML.

Now let's look at Aditha.com, my sister's website. It has not ben updated in nearly two years (but I plan to do so shortly), it's entirely in HTML and all the pages have a rank of at least 4.

As the final example let's look at Rad Inks. This is again a site in PHP, on a small number of pages the exact content displayed is determined by the query string. None of these pages have been asigned a page rank. Some of these pages are over three months old, they have never aquired a page rank value, while some more recent additions have.

The important conclusion is not that pages with a query string do not get ranked, rather the only reasonable conclusion is that 'pages with a query string may not be ranked at this time'