Search engine spiders and tracking parameters

[web-content-king]

Do search engines, and I particularly mean Google, see
http://webdomain.com/?parameter to be the same site as: http://webdomain.com/ assuming that ?parameter is just a tracking parameter and not the filename of a CMS-generated page? I mean, when the spider follows that link, can't it see that it's on that page and that the parameter has not caused it to go to a different page?

I am basically asking for purposes of PageRank, will a link with a URL parameter pass PR or will Google see it as a different page?

Someone must have done an experiment on this. All it would take would be to put a parameter-ed link on a high-PR page to a page that had no other inbound links.

Also, does anyone know if you use a keyword in the parameter, and the URL is then used as the anchor text for a link made with that URL (something many blog scripts do), does it have any Google-bombing power? OK, that's a bit of an opaque sentence, so here's an example:

http://webdomain.com/?baboon

Will webdomain.com be likelier to rank higher on Google, Yahoo, or MSN, for "baboon"? Or does "baboon" in this instance not count as anchor text? If not, is there any way of fooling Google into thinking that "baboon" is anchort text, for instance, by putting in some kind of space between the question mark and the word "baboon"?

Note: I am NOT talking about parameters that include & id # or any of the other characters that google says are associated with CMS files that are hard to spider.

Why do I care? Partly because a lot of links have tracking parameters on them, including some paid links, affiliate links, and also I am trying to track article distributions as well using parameters.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

[web-content-king]

http://yahoo.com/?bigratude

Let's see whether Yahoo! shows up in Google for bigratude any time soon...

[web-content-king]

well, let's try this:

bigratude

See if it isn't just this post here not counting.

[adacprogramming]

One thing I've noticed on my sites.
http://www.topwebsitetips.com/FreeLi...ories.aspx?a=a and
http://www.topwebsitetips.com/FreeLi...rectories.aspx

both go to the same page I just added a parameter so that a feature could be added. The one without the parameter is considered a PR 3 page the one with the parameter is a PR 2 page. This change happened immediately, before the new page with the parameter was spidered. You can do this with any page it seems, just adding a parameter lowers the PR by one.

[JuniorOnline]

I never thought that a parameter would actually affect someone's page rank. Not that page rank make a difference.. we are stuck at page rank 2 for ages - yet with all of the optimisation we are applying, our sales and number of visitors has increased.