Verbose anchor links diluting serps?

home page with lots of descriptive anchors

[calumniate]

Hi there,

We've been hanging on in the serps lately - but just hanging on in a competitive field. We have lots of backlinks and our domain is one of the older ones. One thing I have thought about recently is that on our home page we have quite a number of verbose anchor links to press releases and articles. I have been thinking of removing them and just adding 'press' and 'article' buttons, so that our other 'keyword' friendly anchors are given more merit.

Do you think that my brain is going in the right direction here? To me, it only makes sense as the more articles and press releases we add, the harder it will be for the homepage to handle it. But do you think by removing verbose / 'sentence' anchors google will look at the google friendly ones more?

Thanks very much!

-russell

[calumniate]

any thoughts on this? thanks!

[AndyA]

I recently reduced the number of internal links on my home page, simply because it dilutes the amount of PR the home page can send to other pages. I had 70 links, most of them internal, and reduced them to 50, which I think is still too many.

I'm going to just keep the really important links to directories I want to pass PR to on the home page, and move the rest of the links to another top tier page with a lower PR.

I'm no SEO expert, but what you suggest makes sense to me. That way, your Press and Article pages can pass the PR on to the actual content.

[koan]

Do external links on your homepage dilute your PR to your internal site? I used to be confident that internal links and external links were treated differently in terms of PR redistribution to your site, but I'm not so sure anymore.

[Marcia]

koan, a page is a page and PR is numerical, so an increased number of links going off a page will decrease the value of each link's PR vote to other pages, whether they're external or internal.

At least with the internal linking there's PR being fed back and/or distributed through the rest of the site, creating a nice little PR feedback loop. That isn't always the case with links to outbound sites. The homepage is one place I have concern over for "leaking PageRank" unless there's a good reason to link out.

[annej]

calumniate, Are you talking more about how long the anchor text is for each link? I suspect in that case something between the long verbose ones and something as brief as you are suggesting would be best. Pick the key words out of the text you have for each link now and put it together in a short phrase that describes the page you have linked to.

This way people visiting will be more likely to be able to scan through the links and find what they want. Meanwhile you will be giving the spider some nice concise food in terms of the important key words.

Are these links to items on your site? If not there is a concern about links pointing to other sites from your homepage as has been discussed above.

[calumniate]

annej - they are links that point to articles and things that we have hosted on our site, eg www.domain.com/article1.htm. I don't think we have any external links on our home page.

Thanks for the input.. maybe the descriptions we have aren't so bad..