Are In bound links to a Custom URL ineffective

[SaimanRhino]

Hi All,

I would like to know what would achieve the best inbound link ranking from google. I have to run an inbound link campaign and have to choose between two options:

Option 1, get people to link directly to the home page

or

Option 2, get people to link to a custom url (for example, www.domain.com/index.aspx?dealer1455) the custom url has a function to hide certain menu items on the home page. Also The custom url ID number will also change for each person that links to us. So in effect each link is directed to an individual custom URL.

My preference is option 1. But a number of the people linking to us would prefer to link to a custom home page that has their competitors details hidden. At the end of the day the decision needs to be made on what will provide our  site with the best rankings in the serps

What option is best to improve search engine rankings ?

Many Thanks in advance

[AlanBleiweiss]

If you have multiple variations of www.domain.com/index.aspx linked, each one would, in my understanding of your situation, have one inbound link.  One link pointing to a designated "unique" page is very rarely going to be able to provide any high value ranking.

In addition, each of those "pages" would be indexed and seen as a unique page by search engines.  Since the links would only come from 3rd party sites and NOT from within your site, they'd be even weaker.

So if you prefer to focus on SEO for your site, then links should point to your home page without the index.aspx page name in the URL.

[StalkerB]

While not 100% effective you can tell Google to ignore the ?dealer parameter in Webmaster Tools but that would involve setting up the parameter differently so it looks like ?dealer=1234 rather than ?dealer1234, so not sure how big a pain that is.

Otherwise you can set up a canonical tag so that the canonical version of the page is always /index.aspx for every parameter.

Ideally do both if it will help you get the links in. You should lose very little of the link juice by ignoring the parameter and using canonical.

EDIT: Here's a little bit on parameter handling - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=147959 - complete with clever Barenaked Ladies reference