Some links to our site are referral or affiliate links and include an affiliateid. I just got a google result where our site with ?affiliateid=whatever placed and the site without it didn't.

This made me wonder how google is handling those links and whether they are contributing to the PR of the homepage.

I am also seeing PR differences between the same urls but written differently such as

www.domain/?affiliateid=whatever
www.domain?affiliateid=whatever
www.domain/index.php?affiliateid=whatever

I don't know if it is related, but the whatever they did at Google this last weekend totally destroyed our placement, but not our PR.

Quite a number of sites went down

When Google sees a link as you describe it either passes the PR to the specific link or will not count it at all.

It would not affect the rank of the Home Page. Also Google is notorious for not passing much PR at all to links that contain anything past the ?=whatever , not sure if your links have more varuables.

And with the new Google algorithem Link PR is now only 25% of the equation anyway as before the update it was 75%

Originally posted by wshd
And with the new Google algorithem Link PR is now only 25% of the equation anyway as before the update it was 75% [/b]

Oh?

What is your source of information for those facts?

Well I deal with PR on a daily basis (I run a network of 8 PR 7 websites), also I have a contact that is very close to Google.

Originally posted by wshd
[b]Well I deal with PR on a daily basis

Don't we all.

(I run a network of 8 PR 7 websites)

So, you're an expert telling people that too many outgoing links per page could cause the page to drop in PR value, heh, right, I'll have some of whatever you're smoking.

also I have a contact that is very close to Google.

Jesus, now I've heard it all. *sigh*