Wrapping images and text in the same link?

[realmaverick]

At present on a downloads website I run, each download has a thumbnail, which links to the download, as well as a text link underneath, that links to the same file. It doubles up the number of links per page, which isn't good.

Would wrapping both the image and the text link, in the same a href, be OK?

I had a look at Youtube, they link both the thumbnail and the text individually. But the text link is nofollow, I'd have thought it would be the other way around if anything.

I don't want to use nofollow on any links. Any suggestions?

[edited by: incrediBILL at 12:23 am (utc) on Mar 22, 2011]
[edit reason] cleaned and moved [/edit]

[buckworks]

wrapping both the image and the text link, in the same a href

I often do that. It doesn't cause any problems that I'm aware of.

[realmaverick]

Thanks Buckworks.

FWIW this is more an SEO question, than an HTML question. I know it's possible, my question was to better understand the impact this would have on SERPS.

I accidentally posted in Google Adsense. Ideally this would be moved to the Google SEO forum rather than HTML.

Cheers :)

[realmaverick]

Just looking at Google Chrome extensions. This is pretty much my issue exactly; [chrome.google.com...]

Google themselves are opting to link both the image and the text individually, which is what I'm doing at present.

But then I don't suppose Google has to concern itself with SEO.

I could unlink the image, but most users click the image to view the download. I don't want usability issues.

What would you do?

[realmaverick]

I've just found this at w3.org who suggest combining the image and text in to a single link. [w3.org...]

[tedster]

It doubles up the number of links per page, which isn't good.

Then every target page is still getting essentially the same share of the PR vote, right? Twice as many links, so each individual link is worth half of what it would be - but there's two of them. I don't see any concern, given the math.

[realmaverick]

Hi Tedster, that's true. But given that Google recommends no more than 100 links per page. In my case, on some pages, we're far exceeding this limit.

Some pages for example, list 5 featured downloads = 10 links, 50 regular downloads = 100 links plus the navigational links and breadcrumbs.

Would the move be of benefit, purely to reduce the number of links below 100?

[Leosghost]

Combining them can be a little awkward if you want to leave your text links "decorated" though and yet not have a border on your images.

[tedster]

Google's recommendation is a rule of thumb, not a law. In the old days in was a very big deal. But in recent years, it's been explained several times that the old hard line has softened. There are definite;y situations where the occasional page with over 100 links makes good sense for the visitor.

I also use a single anchor element to wrap both an image and text once in a while. If the text has a hover behavior, the usability touch can be rather nice - hover the image and see appropriate anchor text "light up".

[realmaverick]

Sure I appreciate the 100 link guideline is only a rule of thumb.

The reason I'm exploring this, is because I have a page which should be ranking for a certain keyword, but isn't. Instead a page with less links, that doesn't even have the keywords in the title.

Examining both pages, the page that ranks has 50 links, the page that won't rank has over 300. Most pages aren't this excessive, but this particular page lists compatible operating systems, in addition to the actual downloads.

I figured perhaps the 300 links, could be causing a ranking issue. Even though the 100 links is only a rule of thumb, over 300 maybe seen as excessive?

[tedster]

Especially because anchor text is an on-page factor as well as a target page factor, I agree that 300 links can cause ranking problems. The relevance signals of such a page often get blurred.

[GlobalMax]

Would wrapping both the image and the text link, in the same a href, be OK?

I've done it out of concern that otherwise 2x affiliate links (nofollow, but still) could be worse than x such links by some page quality measure.

[realmaverick]

Thanks very much guys. I feel doing this is the best option. I just wanted to ensure there wasn't anything I'd overlooked.

[aakk9999]

It doubles up the number of links per page, which isn't good.

Then every target page is still getting essentially the same share of the PR vote, right? Twice as many links, so each individual link is worth half of what it would be - but there's two of them. I don't see any concern, given the math.

Does this mean that if you have 5 outbound links on the page, 3 of them going to pages A, B and C respectively and two of them to page D, that the page D (which to which you are pointing 2 links) gets 40% of PR and pages A, B, C get only 20% each?

I know that if there are multiple outbound links to the same page, only the first anchor counts (although there some tests done with # transferring extra anchors to target pages), but I thought if you repeat one outbound link to the same page, it counts only once with regards to PR flow? Perhaps someone could clarify this for me?

Where I am confused is - if repeating an outbound link to the same page would mean that that page gets more PR flowing, then PR sculpting would be easy - just make sure that you link out to your important pages few times and unimportant only once... somehow I have doubt it works like that?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Links affect pagerank which i'm not sure has any influence on serp rankings anymore, if it ever did, but for what it's worth i've used the link+image in one href for some time on one site and it's had no ill (ranking) effects. Traffic didn't drop after I made the change, but it didn't really rise either. It's been 3 years.

[deadsea]

I did some testing and found that only the first link with a specific url on a page passes pagerank. Additional links to the same url DO NOT pass additional pagerank. I was unable to determine if additional links pass their anchor text or not.

From a pagerank perspective, using one link or two for the image and the text should be exactly the same.

[dstiles]

I had a problem with images linked seperately but identically a couple of years ago. At least, I altered it and the listing improved.

The site was built in 1997 and from that date the menu remained the same format although occasionally the actual menu options changed slightly.

The menu had a pretty icon alnogside the actual menu option text - I'd been doing this for years on other sites as well since I clicked on icons on other sites as often as I clicked on the text.

Suddenly the home page dropped out of the SERPS for almost every search. Instead, for each keyword set, a page showing previous widget history was shown.

After making several changes over a few weeks I dropped the link from around the icon. The home page returned within a few days.

There were only about 20 links on the whole page, almost all menu options. Whether dropping 20 duplicate links really fixed the problem I don't know for certain but the impression was that it did.

The problem occurred just before the first geo-location fiasco which caused us to add two new .com sites to augment our single co.uk which had previously been doing very well world-wide. Maybe that had something to do with it (testing geo?) but thanks anyway, google, for turning WWW into LWW.