I have been getting link exchange offers lately from a moving industry portal website saying that they would put their reciprocal link on a page with good PR. When I checked out their website I found that the main page was a PR 6 - it seemed that they had traded a lot of links in the past.

When I found their directory I saw that they had indeed traded lots of links but were actually giving zero in return.

If one just took a quick look it would seem that their offer was indeed quite good as their directory pages all seemed to be a PR4 even the ones that would have been recently added like "real+estate+7".

The problem is that none of these pages are actually listed in Google. If you try and view the cache you find that Google stopped reading the url when it encountered the first "+" sign and if you search for the entire url you find that it is not in Google's index.

So the PR shown is just the toolbar estimating the PR - there really is no PR as the pages are not listed. That means zero benefit.

So, if you come across any sites offering link trades that use the plus sign in their urls - run!
There is no benefit even if the Google toolbar says the page has terrific Page Rank.

Interesting. I have been spent a lot of time surfing the net about the special chars in the URL or guidelines but couldn't find anything semi-official about the + sign in the URLs.

Thanks for the heads-up.

It's probably not the "+" sign or any other character that is causing Google to not include the pages in the index.

In the latter stages of the Jagger update, Google began purging tens of millions of what it considered ro be "useless" pages from its index. In fact, Google is continuously purging these types of pages.

Among the types of pages purged were links pages, affiliate pages, and pages with bery little content. Most of these pages are now in G's Supplemental Results.

Not only did this help Google clean up its index, but it also helped combat link bombing and link spam.

The pages you mention may be carrying their PR until the next update, or there is a chance that they could be spoofing the PR.

I was reading an SEO discussion on the web and the experience of others was that Google treats the plus sign the same as the question mark - that is Google will not spider the page if it comes across it in the course of spidering the web - the spider stops in its tracks when it encounters the character. Google will include such urls in its index if they are actually submitted however.

There is also the issue you bring up as to whether the page is "useless" or not - I find if a directory is too broad (non-real estate categories included for example) it is often a one way ticket to the sin-bin as the web is full of such "directories". So, I personally avoid such trades as well.

I discussed the topic here

http://www.1stpageseo.com/backlinks.php

Link Spammers Alert -- Derogatory Comments.

Doc, I didn't see anything on the page with the + character.

"Google treats the plus sign the same as the question mark - that is Google will not spider the page if it comes across it in the course of spidering the web - the spider stops in its tracks when it encounters the character. Google will include such urls in its index if they are actually submitted however."

Doug, this is simply not true. I have thousands of pages with the question mark preceding a variable that are indexed and cached with no submission and no site map.

The idea that search engines have problems with the question mark in urls is not mine - it is widely accepted as you know by most SEOs. The directory in your sig (is that your directory?) accepts that premise as well if you look at the link criteria.

A Google rep (not Matt Cutts) wrote about it a couple of years ago - and I wish I still had the article. In the article it was stated that Google did avoid spidering such urls - also that they would include the url in their search results and analyze the page but any links that were on the page would not be followed because their spider did not want to become trapped. I guess the idea was that most dynamic pages also link to other dynamic pages.

Time has passed and things have probably improved but Google's Webmaster Guidelines still state "If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few."

If your pages are actually indexed with no submission or site map (or links to them located on a static page somewhere) them you are still probably the exception and not the rule.

I would still scrutinize very carefully any page that had a question mark or plus sign in the url if it were offered in a link trade. In my own directory, I have accepted such urls that I can verify to be listed but all of them eventually have become "unlisted" in Google - so I can understand why the directory in your sig will not accept them.

Yes the directory is mine, but it was built on a premise that existed at the time of it's inception... and it wasn't that the spider stopped with the variable, but simply that it slowed it down alot.

It just flat out did and still does to some extent, IMO, but it never stopped a priority page from getting indexed. The PR on the page was always unreliable because when you add a variable to an existing page it always shows one level below the value of the originating page (though the cache and indexing were always reliable).

As search engines get better at ferreting out valuable pages (site structure and link strength more so than url patterns) the rewriting of the url's becomes less important, IMO. I still do rewrite most of my sites and check out url's with variables in them for links alot more closely because search engines seem to still get through them less quickly and with most applications it doesn't add a great deal of time.

In the end, the only thing that I was saying was that the ? in the url doesn't stop the spider.

Yes, the spider stopping in its tracks statement may be a bit of overstatement nowadays. Although, according to Google's Webmaster Guidelines the "?" still causes trouble on its own and if you add a session ID "&id=43" for example - the spider does stop in its tracks and the page is not listed.

I don't think that I have any urls anywhere with two variables that I try to get indexed but I know they used to do so in the past. page.asp?abid=1&pid=2

It was, and is, IMO much more a function of the links to the page than the format of the url string.

It'd be easy enough to test if there weren't references readily available. Anybody got any?

ahh good to know I almost used those in a meta keyword.
Thanks