Can Images and Captions use separate anchor tags?

[Atharva]

Hi,
I have been an avid reader of these forums and have helped me tremendously. Thanks all for a wonderful effort. i usually read stuff posted by martini, brett, pageonresults and tedster :)

Anyways coming back to the topic.
i have an image gallery and i have captions below each thumbnail image

the html for each thumbnail goes like this

<a href="somepage.php"><img src="a.jpg"></a><br><a href="somepage.php">This is image caption</a>

So i am having 2 links going to somepage.php, one as a text anchor and another as an image anchor.

So wrt spiders etc
1. will google and other SE spiders see this as an issue as i have twice the number of links than normally it should be

2. should i do
<a href="somepage.php"><img src="a.jpg"><br>This is image caption</a>
and stick with one anchor and will this help reduce links and effectivly use my PR on internal pages ?

Hope i have explained it properly
Thanks

[tedster]

Hello Atharva, and welcome to active posting!

I've got sites that do this both ways, and I do not see any differences in how Google handles it.

[Atharva]

Thanks for that, but wont the twice number of links to same URL cause a dilution of link juice passed ?

Thanks

[tedster]

Let's talk about an example. 40 unique links on a page would split the PR vote 40 ways. But if we go up to 50 links on the same page by doubling 10 of them, then it seems like the total PR vote gets split by 50. Your concern is that the doubled links would get a 2/50 share of the PR vote and the unique links on the same page would only get a 1/50 share.

We just don't know for sure. There's been some conjecture that, for PageRank purposes, Google ignores the second link on page to the same url -- and I think that is a good guess. But it still is a guess. As far as I know, there's been no official word from Google about refinements to PR calculation like this.

Let's think about a common practice: page1.html might link to different named anchors within page2, such as page2.html#nameA, page2.html#nameB and so on. We know that Google does not index the characters in the url beyond a hash mark (#) so these are all "identical" links. It would be quite counter-intuitive to allow that common linking schema to dilute the PR vote of other links on the page.