Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
What is the treatment by Google of multiple links to a single page both internally and between sites? Should we be restricting ourselves to one link per page?
What is the treatment by Google of multiple links to a single page both internally and between sites? Should we be restricting ourselves to one link per page?
Whitey - Your question is one that's intrigued me for a while. There are multiple combinations and permutations of what you're asking, though, and I'm not quite sure which one you're asking about. For now, I'm going to respond about multiple links from one page to another single page, and talk about internal navigation only.
First... there's no reason that I can see for restricting yourself to one internal link from a page to another.
As to how Google regards multiple links from one page to one another... a claim of testing I've seen online stated that if Google finds several links on a page to another page, it will consider only the first link that it finds.
I haven't run a systematic test, but I do look at serps and sites a lot. With regard to internal navigation, at least, looking at the links displayed in Google SiteLinks suggests something very different. I think that Google looks at multiple links on a page and at their anchor text. It's not clear how it weights them or how it sums these multiple links at the destination page.
(SiteLinks, I should note, are those five clustered links shown on some top listings in Google serps.)
See...
Google publishes information on SiteLinks (extended listings)
[webmasterworld.com...]
On client sites that show Google SiteLinks for several searches, we have nav that combines side text nav, image nav with alt text, paragraph text links, and footer nav text... often with several links linking to the same page, and with different anchor text in each. On these sites, I've seen sets of SiteLinks that include anchor text from all the different global nav positions...
- side text nav
- image nav with alt text
- footer text nav
The SiteLinks displayed are definitely not the first links on the page (ie, in code order), which suggests to me that all the links are looked at, and it's not necessarily the first that's the most important.
It's possible that if you have three links from one of your pages to another, you're conferring triple the PageRank of one link. The math suggests that the PR conferred by single links is divided up equally among all the links on a page. Conceivably, the anchor text is similarly weighted. Google definitely notices which pages on a site you deem most important by the frequency of links to them. It may also be, though, that the algo somehow discounts "link love" if there's a common source of the links.
Keep in mind, btw, that the SiteLink "algo" is definitely not the same as the ranking algo. If you search...
site:domain word1 word2
...the serps will not be the same as the site links.
I'm not sure how broad you intended your question to be. We could also discuss the same situation between two pages on different domains. Run-of-site links have been discussed a lot... but the question of two or three links from the same page to one page is slightly different, and, to me, more interesting and less easy to answer.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:57 am (utc) on Mar. 22, 2007]
So in the process of recognising navigation elements, the linked .gif will likely not interfere with the text link delivering the keyword to the receiving page.
However, if there are multiple links to the same page it could conceivably dilute the strength of the links to a point where there might be no keyword benefit for the receving page ie the PR/link strength would be divided by the number of links. Do you see this as correct?
And if so would this principle apply to an inbound link from another site?
[edited by: Whitey at 9:48 am (utc) on Mar. 22, 2007]
