First Text Link on a Page
23rd March 2009
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Just had an interesting conversation with Avi about this topic. Let me start out by saying, I don’t necessarily believe everything Google says. And, for that matter, I don’t take what Rand says to be the absolute truth in SEO either. Even though he has a strong following of people, many of which seem to blindly accept whatever he says. Over the course of time, I’ve conducted my own undocumented/unofficial experimentation regarding using text links for keyword ranking. Basically, trial & error. In my experience, I’ve found that if you have multiple links on a page it’s the 1st link that gets crawled, that gets the credit. I’m backing up what Rand says, that for keyword ranking purposes, it’s the “first anchor text that counts“. For example, if you have 2 links on your sidebar which mention the exact same anchor text, only the first link the search engine spider crawls will get the SEO value of the textlink for keyword ranking. For example within this post, here are 2 text links with the exact same anchor text: The first text link gets the “juice”. But, what if you want the 2nd text link to get the “juice”. The answer is to place a nofollow on the first textlink. ———————— Related posts: |
Here’s a quick summary of my position on multiple text links on a webpage that contain the EXACT same anchor text…
March 23rd, 2009 at
Hi Shimon,
The first link pointing to the same page or same domain?
March 24th, 2009 at
I agree with your premise, that the search engines pretty much ignore the second link on a page to the same URL (so make sure the first link is keyword rich if possible), but I disagree with your prescription. A “nofollow” to an internal link look at best like you are confused or do not trust your own pages, and at worst like purposeful manipulation (which, in this case, it is). These are not the message you want to send the search engines if you want your domain to be considered trustworthy.
March 24th, 2009 at
@Kenneth Dreyer - to the same target URL.
March 24th, 2009 at
In theory, you would think that this is default behavior. if I were a Search Engineer, I’d surely look at filtering anything of a repetitive nature.
I just got on board with the rel=”nofollow” usage for internal link equity. I basically nofollow any duplicates that are not surrounded by relevant content period. The one left standing is usually within the primary content or sitting next to some that is relevant to IT.
It only makes sense to use the creme from the crop. All those duplicate instances just water down the creme.
As a standard rule of thumb, first to market wins the DoFollow. That means when I view source, the first reference of that link is probably the one I focus on. If you are not using SOC (Source Ordered Content), you may have a different strategy.
I shoot for having all primary content right after the opening element which allows me to control link equity at a different level. I think so anyway.
March 27th, 2009 at
So what’s the point then of having two text links with the same anchor text on one page if you’re just going to no follow the second and let the first get all of the attention? Confused!
March 30th, 2009 at
@Amber - If you want the 1st link to get the “juice”, then there is no need to nofollow the second link.
August 9th, 2009 at
Is this applicable if the links are the same or different?
If the anchor text is different and the links are the same what then applies.