2 links on home page to each category page ..... is page rank being watered down?
-
I am working on a site that has a home page containing 2 links to each category page. One of the links is a text link and one link is an image link.
I think I'm right in thinking that Google will only pay attention to the anchor text/alt text of the first link that it spiders with the anchor text/alt text of the second being ignored.
This is not my question however. My question is about the page rank that is passed to each category page.....
Because of the double links on the home page, my reckoning is that PR is being divided up twice as many times as necessary. Am I also right in thinking that if Google ignore the 2nd identical link on a page only one lot of this divided up PR will be passed to each category page rather than 2 lots ..... hence horribly watering down the 'link juice' that is being passed to each category page??
Please help me win this argument with a developer and improve the ranking potential of the category pages on the site
-
I guess as with most things SEO .... I'll test it.
Thanks both for joining the discussion.
I'll post results ... if indeed there are any.
-
To concur with what Brent has said above; although we know that Google divides the PR passed around from links on a page, we don't know exactly how much by, or in some cases, they can actually just ignore the duplicate link.
I wouldn't worry too much about this particular case to be honest. It would be more of an issue if there were 10-15 links all pointing to the category page on each page of the website.
You could, however, maybe do a test over the space of a month or so by removing the second link and see if you get any noticeable improvement in rankings. If you do this, I would be quite interested to see the results, so let me know.
Matt.
-
Since we truly don't know Google's secret recipe, we can't say if PR is split.
I don't believe you will loose any Link Juice with duplicate links. You can have 10 links to the same url, but Google only sees this as 1 url.
Interesting article on SEOmoz:
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/an-internal-link-juice-tool-14969
Interesting PR tool from that article: (PageRank Link Juice Calculator)
http://www.ecreativeim.com/pagerank-link-juice-calculator.php
I read a comment from SEOmoz's Dr. Pete:
"Google sometimes views navigation differently, but it's a bit hard to say. My general assumption with Google ignoring 2nd (3rd, etc.) links to the same Page B from any Page A, is that they ignore those links completely. Since they don't pass PR and their anchor text doesn't count, I'd tend to treat that page as if it had 10 links. If anyone has evidence to the contrary, I'd certainly love to hear it."
View Post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many#jtc131211
-
Hi Matt,
Thanks for confirming my thoughts.
What I forgot to mention is that the 2 links to same category pages is being done from the sites main navigation (i.e not just an issue on home page). Therefore, i'm thinking that when all this lost PR is added up it could be incredibly damaging to the ranking potential of the category pages. What would you think?
-
Hey there,
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head with all of your comments.
1. Google will only really pay attention to the first link that it crawls and not really pass on any link juice through the second.
2. By having the two links, you will be watering down the amount of PR that is being sent over to page.
If the image is next to the text link, you could just wrap them both in the same hyperlink (obviously if they are not next to each other then there is no point.
One thing that I would say is that this isn't going to be an incredibly damaging thing toward your SEO, so you need to sum up whether it really adds to the user experience and conversion potential and see if this is outweighed by the decrease in SEO. Once you have decided which one wins, make your choice there.
Hope this helps.
Matt.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to find all crawlable links on a particular page?
Hi! This might sound like a newbie question, but I'm trying to find all crawlable links (that google bot sees), on a particular page of my website. I'm trying to use screaming frog, but that gives me all the links on that particular page, AND all subsequent pages in the given sub-directory. What I want is ONLY the crawlable links pointing away from a particular page. What is the best way to go about this? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | AB_Newbie0 -
Pages Linking to Sites that Return 404 Error
We have just a few 404 errors on our site. Is there any way to figure out which pages are linking to the pages that create 404 errors? I would rather fix the links than create new 301 redirects. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jsillay0 -
Too Many On-Page Links - caused by a drop down menu
Many of our e-com sites we build for customers have drop down menus to help the user easily find products without having to click - Example: http://www.customandcommercial.com/ But this then causes the report to trigger too many on page links We do have a site map and a google site map So should I put code in place not to follow the drop down menu link items or leave in place?
Technical SEO | | spiralsites0 -
What has happened to my page rank
hi my page rank for the site www.in2town.co.uk was page rank four and then last week it went down to page rank 2 and now my page rank is 0. i really do not understand what has happened. can anyone please give me advice on what is happening
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Too many on page links
Hi All, As we all know, having to much links on a page is an obstacle for search engine crawlers in terms of the crawl allowance. My category pages are labeled as pages with to many "one page" links by the SEOmoz crawler. This probably comes from the fact that each product on the category page has multiple links (on the image and model number). Now my question is, would it help to setup a text-link with a clickable area as big as the product area? This means every product gets just one link. Would this help get the crawlers deeper in these pages and distribute the link-juice better? Or is Google smart enough already to figure out that two links to the same product page shouldn't be counted as two? Thanks for your replies guys. Rich
Technical SEO | | Horlogeboetiek0 -
Too many on page links
Hello I have about 800 warnings with this. Example of one url with this problem is: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/clearance?dir=asc&order=price I was checking and I think all links are important. But I suppose that if I put a nofollow on the links on the left which are only for navigation purposes I can get rid of these warnings. Any other idea?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Does duplicate content on word press work against the site rank? (not page rank)
I noticed in the crawl that there seems to be some duplicate content with my word press blog. I installed a seo plugin, Yoast's wordpress seo plugin, and set it to keep from crawling the archives. This might solve the problem but my main question is can the blog drag my site down?
Technical SEO | | tommr10