URL parameters affecting link juice

[sparrowdog]

I have a couple of quirks in my online shop that I'm ironing out. One of them is adding some URL parameters to product links.ie: website.com/product.html?&cat=0&featured=Y

If someone links to this URL, will I get the link juice as if it was website.com/product.html ?

I have URL parameters in Webmaster Tools and robots.txt set up to ignore them so they're not in the Google index, but I have found a few websites that have linked to us using these longer URL's and I'm wondering whether to write to them and ask them if they mind changing them or not.

[LesleyPaone]

Can you be more clear, with all of the different ecommerce systems, most of them do the urls different. Are you saying that your ecommerce platform produces urls like site.com/product.html and that will take you to a product page? Or does the platform need the url parameters to figure out which product to display?

[sparrowdog]

I have an SEO pack installed on my shop that produces the ....product.html portion of the URL.

However, a layout feature on the site calls on javascript and adds some 'junk' on to the end of it. I am going to have the coding on the page removed, but I now have people linking to ....product.html?&cat=0&featured=Y instead of .....product.html

Likewise, I am about to set up an affiliate program and while I will be directing my affiliates to nofollow the links, I want to also set up an affiliate account for 'in-house' use and use them in blog posts to see whether my blog posts are converting in to sales. These URL's will also have a parameter at the end of them ie: ......product.html?partnerid=1234 (for example)

Will I get the internal keyword link juice from the URL's with the partner ID on the end?

[LesleyPaone]

In that case, use a canonical url and you should be fine. Have the canonical point to the page with no query string on it. You had me worried, I thought you might have a platform that needed the parameters to show products, then you mentioned you took them out in GWT. I have seen clients do that on the platforms that need the query strings and de-index all of their product pages.