Is it a bad idea to make multiple links to the same page?

Hi everybody!

I'll try to explain clearly what I'm asking...
Let's say I have a page A with 3 links to the same page B.
- first link anchor text is composed of a few words, targeted to page B content (actually, they are very similar to page B' title tag)
- second link anchor text is very long: it is an article's abstract (the whole article is contained in page B)
- third link anchor text is "Click here to continue".

These multiple links are there for design reasons...

My question is: does the page B's ranking affected by these multiple links?
I know a link is optimal if the anchor text contains a few words and not a long phrase. I want to optimize page B's ranking for the terms contained in the first link's anchor text.
But I fear that the 2 other links are a bad idea....

What do you think about that?
Have you ever made some tests about that?

I hope my questions are clear. Forgive my poor english

Best,

PR Weaver

 

The other two links are not a bad idea at all. The don't do anything bad for SEO. Of course, a lot of people are going to disagree with me

 

Thank you for your answer.
Do you think they are neutral (ignored by Google)?

 

No.
You can have 5 links to a page, but it counts as one link in the PageRank calculations.
However, the anchor text is treated differently. I guess duplicate anchor texts are removed, but different ones are merged and count as one long anchor. To prevent spamming, Google probably counts only one keyword match per anchor text (example link: "keyword1 keyword2 ... keyword1 keyword 2..."). But that's my guess.
Anchor text is treated differently, because a search engine does not want to leave out important keywords. So, it shouldn't ignore multiple links to the same page, but just prevent spamming. jmo.

 

I agree with DigitalPoint.

I've definitely seen at least anecdotal evidecence on my sites that more than one link on a single page is weighted more heavily than one link (for PR).

my guess would be that it's something like this: the more links you have, the less each link passes. however, if you link to a page twice, slightly more PR will be sent that way- maybe twice as much (although I'm guessing this is unlikely), or maybe just somewhere between the regular value and twice the regular value passed.

 

Actually, I don't care about PR issues since it's not the major criteria for ranking.
I agree with you, nohaber, but I don't understand what you really think about how Google may prevent spamming?

Let's study 2 cases:

1- Page A has tens of links. 3 of them point to page B. The anchor texts are "keyword1 keyword2", "keyword1 keyword 3", and "keyword1 keyword 4".
Do you think that these 3 links help page B to rank for the 3 keyword phrases located in these anchor texts?

2- Page A has tens of links. 3 of them point to page B. The anchor texts are "keyword1 keyword2", {a very long phrase}, "Click here to continue".
Do you think Google ignore the last 2 links because they contain too much words?

Thank you for sharing your thoughts

Best,
PR Weaver

 

NO. It is a MAJOR criteria for ranking.

Yes. It should help the 3 phrases. It should NOT help the ranking of "keyword1" because it is repeated. Actually, all anchor text is indexed, BUT, not all matches increase the relevancy.

I wouldn't say it will ignore them. Google will certainly index them.

I guess all anchor text is indexed. If you have 3 links, their anchors are added together. What should prevent spamming is to count only one match per anchor text (single or concatenated).

 

I think we shouldn't talk about PageRank in this thread in order to concentrate on the first question... Maybe another interesting thread to create?

The interest of these links resides in the anchor text. I don't try to boost page A's ranking but only (in this example) page B's ranking. It seems obvious that Google would index the three links on page A but this was not my question...

By the way, nohaber, do you base your answers on facts (tests, analysis) or on feelings?

Best,
PR Weaver

 

Let take question 2. first. The question suggests that you think it is possible that Google will just reject some links out of hand if the anchor text exceeds some predetermined limit. I don't think this is true, but long anchor text obviously will dilute the relevance value of any, or all, of the words contained in that long anchor text.

Now as far as a "click here to continue" anchor text link goes it is absolutely useless for relevance determination and could never effect your SERP placement. (It may or may not contribute PR, but you don't want to talk about that.)

So now we come the far more normal situation described by question 1. There is always a problem understanding exact what people mean when we use things like "keyword1" etc. I assume your three examples might have been something like this.

Anchor text 1. "online gambling"
Anchor text 2. "online casinos"
Anchor texr 3. "online sportsbook"

In that case "online" isn't really a keyword but is part of a keyword phrase. You are not trying to optimize for "online" as someone's answer has assumed.

Most of the people who have answered so far seem to be confident that Google will read and evaluate all three links. That frankly surprised me, because I have seen this question debate long and hard on other forums and the conclusion normally was that Google would only use the first link it came to where there were multiple links to the same URL on a page.

If this is the case then both of your questions are meaningless. But if as others claim or suspect, Google will read or evaluate all links regardless of duplicate URLs then I think the question 1. scenario would pass relevance to page B for all three anchor text phrases.

And relevance in the end is the more important than PR in determing SERP placement. So you are correct to deal with this aspect and not worry about the PR calculation involved.

 

Knowledge and experience in algorithms and programming.

 

Thank you Bob, I think you understood very well what I was dealing with.
I agree with you about relevance/PR/ranking...

PR Weaver

 

I do not have a view on whether all 3 links will be read and whether it will be 3 times PR beneficial cmopared to 1 link. But, I think that the fact that you are using a lot of non-targetted anchor text in link 2 and 3, will hurt (dilute?) google's understanding of the relevance of your page B to the intended keyphrase (link 1 anchor text).

Ajeet

 

It should be fairly easy to set up an experiment though it may require a ton of patience since we might have to wait until the next PR update to see the result. But suppose we choose one page and creat two new ones. We link from the chosen page to new page 1 one time. We link to new page 2 5 times with different anchor text. We wait and see what happens. We should choose keyword targets that are non competitive as they are easier to track.

 

Sounds like a reasonable experiment Jim. Why don't you go ahead and set it up and report back to us when you have some results?

 

Interesting idea you've raised.

Something I would have to question though, why would it be a necessity for design purposes to link to an entire article abstract? Why not have a link like something to the effect of "Click here for the rest of the article" in the case that G does take into account multiple links to the same URL on the same page.

 

Here's what I'm thinking. Get a blogspot blog and create two identical posts so we know text is not affecting SERPs. Problem is one might not get indexed at all.

If we change the text then we won't know how much the different text is affecting SERPs.

By the way I was thinking about blogging about a book I sometimes work on and would use Amelia Drakescale (which returns 1 Google result now) OR Caleb Blackfist (which returns 61 Google results) - as the primary keyword targets.

To see if the second and third links helped, we'd also do "Ameilia Drakescale human warrior" - One page gets one link: "Amelia Drakescale". The other page gets three: One link would be "Amelia Drakescale" and one would be "human" and one "warrior"

Sound good or does anyone have some suggestions?

 

Jim, no matter how you set it up someone will question the methodology, so just do it and don't worry about it.

As far as having identical content on both target pages couldn't you just reverse the order of a couple of paragraphs and thereby have the identical words on each page, albeit not the identical "content"?

 

I do want the experiment to be worthwhile so we should get the methodology as sound as possible. I think I will just mess with the order of a few senteces that do not contain the keywprds - that's a good idea.

 

There is also another way to use tell spider your anchor text without appearing on the pages. It is like tha <IMG> ALT tags. Use TITLE inside <A HREF>