The way my site is set up right now I have a navbar on every page that has all of my "tier 2" pages. These pages all have PR 4 or greater so they show up in my Google backlinks to my homepage. The navbar is set up with anchor tags but no anchor text. I've been adding other anchor tags with links to my homepage on some of my pages with anchor text containing some of the keywords I'm targeting. To see what I'm talking about take a look at this page: http://www.guitar-resource-center.com/beginners_electric_guitar.html There is the navbar w/link to the homepage, plus a link at the bottom of the page to my homepage containing some keywords. Also its a PR 3 page but previously was PR 4 till I re-did it. My question is if I have an anchor tag link with no anchor text in my navbar to my homepage and another link to my homepage that contains anchor text with keywords on the same page, how does Google distinguish between the two?
I don't think anyone actually knows... My best guess is maybe it's shared/diluted. If you have 2 links to the same place on a page with 10 total links, maybe that page gets 20% of the PageRank value. {shrug}
First of all what is an anchor tag? But if I understand the question correctly it is usually considered that google will only use one link per page if there are more than one link to the same page. It is also felt that they will usually use the first link they come to. So if you folllow the usual practice of putting a "home" link on the top of the page and subsequently putting a link on the bottom of the page using good anchor text, you probably won't get any credit for the second link. If the design of the page will allow it you are probably better to use a link with good anchor text at the top and then put the conventional "home" link on the bottom of the page. Or use a graphical link on the top with your prime keyword as the alt tag, and a "home" text link on the bottom. Google will probably ignore the "home" link but it will be there for your user if s/he is at the bottom of the page and wants to go home.
Google should index all links. There are 2 aspects - linking structure and hit lists 1) linking structure - no matter how many links you put to a page, it counts as one link in the linking structure (used to calculate PageRank, LocalRank) 2) the hit lists contain the keywords of all page elements. if you have 2 different links to the same page, they should both be indexed and participate. Your "Home" link does not contain any info (it does not have an alt image tag). So nothing will be written in the index about it. The anchor text of the second link will be indexed and will help the rankings. btw. why don't you replace the graph menu with simple text links?