Does this benefit anything ... ?ref=www.YOURURL.com/

Example: http://www.gopinsight.com/?ref=www.grandoldportal.com/

I have seen this on a few urls and I was wondering if it benefits you at all.

Possibly. There may be a hit counter type thing that coutns the referals from specific sites who have deals with the "gopinsite" admin guys... OR, It could just be to make em look fancy and sophisticated :P "Well La-Dee-Dah! Fancy referal system or what?" etc.



EDIT: Or, If you mean for sites in general that have ?ref= type things, not just that one, then there is no benefit unless the programmer specificly added it, such as a hit counter or whatever. Any site will take the ?ref= thing, but not all will even notice its there :\

benefit in what way?

having a url like that pointing to your site can have serious repercussions with Google listings if it's implemented incorrectly.

The reason why I am asking is because I signed up with a contextual ad service and if you click on any of their links ... it loads through their clicking software and then loads a new url (the url of the site) except on the end of each url is that ?ref=www.YOURURL.com/ so I was wondering if there is some way to find out if this helps the server determine where the visitor came from or something. I mean, my raw logs tell me who refers people to my sites but I have a lot of "unkowns" or "unresolved" hits and would like to know where they are coming from. Also if it worked the other way around where if I added this to all my links so that when I send people to other sites that those other webmasters know that the visitors are coming from my site.

It's hard to write down what I am thinking in my head. I hope you understand my question.

It depends how the eventual redirect is being done.

It won't help you find where visitors arrive from

NO do not add this to your outgoing URIs unless you understand what the implications are with redirects.

unknown referers can be SE spiders, visitors from bookmarks or email (not webmail)

Ok Thanks!!