Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Let's say I have two websites, A and B. On A's index.php and detail.php I placed links of website B like this:
A -> index.php -> B
A -> detail.php -> B
So a search engine like Google will take into account both back links or only one i.e. it will take into account back link per domain?
Physical domain or logical domain?
Many people say that links on different pages from the same domain to the same page results in less weight being passed. Whether that's true or not is up for debate.
Rand Fishkin also just released the results of some testing that seem to indicate multiple links on the same page to the same page results in only the first link passing any weight - [seomoz.org...] However someone in the comments says multiple links DO count according to their testing.
Rand did NOT say "only the first link is passing any weight" - they tested for whether it passed anchor text influence. Note that the PageRank power, the pure "vote" of the link, was not being tested.
Links have several values. PageRank is what search engineers call a "query-independent" factor, whereas anchor text influence is query-dependent - it's a relevance factor - and it's that part of the total picture that Rand's crew tested for.
Also note Rand's disclaimer: "NOTE: My tests on these are more than a year old, so things may have changed."
"Link on both pages will be classed as links, however if all your links have the same anchor text you will get a significant devaluation in the PR multiplication factor."
So that means as long as the anchor text is different you can have as many links coming from same domain or page may be.
Good, b/c that would be somewhat goofy.
Having said that, nowadays I wonder if the last links pass no weight. Google has this paranoia about footer links.
This test case brings up an issue. You could spend a fair bit of time testing and then by the time you get done, even if you successfully isolated the variables, Google could change the algo.
We don't hear too many tests in this forum do we? I wonder if we pooled our ideas on what to test and how to test, if we'd come up with some good new experiments and useful conclusions.
p/g
Rand did NOT say "only the first link is passing any weight" - they tested for whether it passed anchor text influence. Note that the PageRank power, the pure "vote" of the link, was not being tested.
I originally typed anchor text weight but deleted those words out.
If you put two links to a page on a single page does anyone know if GWT shows 1 or 2 incoming links to that page? Although this doesn't really answer the PageRank question it would be interesting if they did in fact report 2 incoming links.
I have found the links Google chooses tell me a little bit about what Google might look at when it looks at links....Eg, it's been said that, in case of multiple links on page A to page B, Google will only look at the first link it finds on page A. At least in the Sitelinks, though, I see that the anchor text to page B from our second link on our home page is what Google is using in one of the Sitelinks. It ignores the first....
...I don't know, though, that Google weights these things for rankings....
