Second anchor text on page. Does it count?
-
Back in 2008 there was "proof" that the anchor text of a second link on a page would not be counted for the anchor text.
In the MOZ starter guide it is still advocated: https://mza.seotoolninja.com/learn/seo/anchor-textBUT in 2014 it was reported on searchengine land:
http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-one-page-two-links-page-counted-first-link-192718
That the second link might be counted. Direct link to the matt cuts video from 28 may 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AsLWIuNNMU(Even in 2010 there where already some different opinions and work arounds.
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/the-first-link-counts-rule-and-the-hash-sign
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/ugc/3-ways-to-avoid-the-first-link-counts-rule (2011)Question: did anyone recently test this recently?
The deeper questions are:
1:is the LINK value counted if you have more that one link on a page to another page?
2: is the Anchor text counted if you have more than one anchortext to another page?The most interresting i have is that i have a menu from which i link to my important pages. Does it help to put extra links in the content to specific pages?
-
Hi Stramark,
How did you get on in your testing? Just wondering what the latest on this is for 2015-2016?Thanks.
-
I have done a test of my own.
I used a very important page on my website.
The page has not been changed for more than 2 months.
The page has a link from the main menu with the money keyword "zoekmachine marketing"
I used the blogpart of my website to add 5 extra links like this: https://www.stramark.nl/zoekmachine-marketing/#4-p-zoekmachine-marketingI ran the keyword ranking on the specific anchor text on the 9th of july, and today again.
The result is significantly positive. I will monitor for a few extra days
-
This is also a question of usability / user experience. If your page incorporating in-article anchor links is laid out well and has engaged users clicking those links to explore the different sections of the page, you're likely getting a lower bounce rate and better numbers in-terms of users bouncing back to the search results from your page.
In ATPs case, those links were likely causing navigational confusion and/or potential keyword stuffing flags. Cleaning them up served his site better.
In either case, I don't think it's a simple question of solely how many links count, especially in real world usage. Cheers!
-
Hi Stramark,
This is an interesting debate that I have tried to test myself to some extent and found some mixed results.
A site I took over had category pages linked off the home page in 3 locations, the main nav bar, in the content, and in the footer. The anchor text was different in all 3. I made relatively minor changes but the main one was to make the anchor text the same and remove the footer links. (Basically avoiding any threat of being tagged for spammy links with different keywords)
3 Out of the 8 or so categories saw visible improvements with the removal and standardisation of the anchor text. Very few other changes were made to these pages or the site.
This change leads me to believe that not only can more than 1 link have an impact, but different anchor text on the multiple links also can, multiple links are not simply ignored. However, The big debate i guess is whether that is a good or bad impact, since cleaning them up and removing them helped my pages.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Site review : Should I finish on-page optimization before I start link building ??
Site Review am seeing slight improvement with a few keywords and have revamp site do i need to first on page before link building ? I was wondering do i need to complete all on page seo before i move on to link building & marketing content ?? Kindest regards, Stephen sportingdesires
Link Building | | sportingdesires0 -
Low Page Authority for key landing pages
Hi guys - I am struggling to understand why I have a Page Authority of 1 (!) for most of my key product landing pages. All of them are linked to directly from the Homepage, which has PA 46 and DA 40. Many of them are also linked to from high ranking external sites. Less valuable pages on the site, with far fewer links, seem to have much higher PA. For some reason these just don't seem to be registering the link juice which is flowing to them. In fact, OSE doesn't seem to register any links for them - perhaps this is the biggest clue? I am at a bit of a loss. Some of these pages still rank highly for relevant keywords on Google. But something clearly isn't quite right. Has anyone experienced similar?
Link Building | | HireSpace0 -
Do citations count as backlinks?
Hello, So I may have a simple question- do citations such as yp and manta for an example count as backlinks? So if they do, would this be a natural link so good for seo? or a citation where it may be a backlink, but not very helpful for seo backlink profile? Thank you to all
Link Building | | Berner0 -
Should I Be Concerned About Unnatural Links Pointing to 404 Pages?
I bought an existing domain name on Sedo sometime ago and launched a new website on it in early June this year. I noticed there are about 5 or 6 spammy links from directories that were obviously bought by the previous domain owner but they're pointing to pages that never existed on the new website. Other than that, the link profile is 100% clean and it's quite good actually, lots of links from my content being shared on social networks. So should I be worried about these links? Like a lot of webmasters, I'd like to avoid using the disavow tool, I really don't trust that thing.
Link Building | | sbrault740 -
Do links from the second page of an article pass link juice?
I have been writing for some sites with a high overall page rank and the articles are being viewed as quality by search engines as well. However, they usually put a link to my site at the very end of the article and then break the article down into two pages to increase ad revenue. It seems that I'm not getting much credit for that link even if the page has a high SEOmoz/PR score. I want to know if I am getting the benefit from these links. If not, how do I make sure I get the most bang, even if my link is on a second page of the article? Here is an example of what I mean: http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2012/08/22/kanban-for-customers-how-to-increase-transparency-in-your-business/
Link Building | | LawrenceWatkins0 -
Merging 10 niche pages into 1 large page: how to go about it?
Good day,
Link Building | | rayvensoft
I am new to SEOmoz, so please allow me to take this opportunity to introduce myself before jumping into the questions. I have a small network of sites that focus on language education online. I have been working on them for about 3 years, and they were starting to do well. I am sure I made some mistakes along the way with regards to SEO (I paid for article distribution, and directory submission). I also did link exchanges - mainly with related sites, but some of them were kind of grey . I stayed away from blackhat entirely.
So, like many people I got affected by Google Penguin. Luckily it was not as bad as many of the people I have heard about. 7 out of my 10 sites, stayed on or near the top for the main keywords. They did however drop for some of the secondary keywords. 3 of the sites however got hit hard. Based on this, I have ventured to guess that google is telling me I was doing it about 70% right, and 30% wrong. Well, live and learn.
After April 24th I started to scower the web to find out what happened and to see what to do. In my readings I noticed that a lot of people were affected, but some where not. The one thing I found that most of the people who were affected had in commune was that they were on SEOmoz. So I decided to join. So now I am here to hopefully learn what I did wrong, and what I need to do right. I have no problem at all in starting from scratch and putting in the hard work. Now, as for my question. As I mentioned, not all of my sites were hit by Penguin. More of them survived than got killed. I was hoping to be able to leverage those sites to give the new larger site a kick-start. Just to give you some metric, all 10 sites have a quality rank of between 40-60 according opensiteexplorer. The linking is nothing extreme. The pages have anywhere from 200-1000 links. Nothing more than that. So here are the questions. 1) The SEO I did on all 10 sites were very similar. So I am afraid of just doing a 301 redirect from the 7 other sites in the future google may punish them as well, and as such my main page new page will suffer. What would you guys recommend. Instead of a 301, I could just ad a link to the sub pages on the new site. It would be less effective, but also less risky. What would you all suggest? 2) If I take the 301 option, what is the general recommendation on how to phase it in. I am assuming Google would not like it if all 7 pages got redirected on the same day. That would essentially make the page have 5000 or so links overnight. What is the general recommendation for these kinds of things. one 301 a week? one 301 a month? The 301's would not be to the homepage, they would each go to a relevant sub-section of the site. Sorry for the long first post. My wife tells me I don't know when enough is enough sometimes. 🙂 Thanks in advance for any assistance and I am excited to see what I can learn on SEOmoz.0 -
Redirect a 404 page
Hi We encountered a problem with our site during a migration to a new platform and we lost much of link juice. I have noticed on SEOmoz Open Site explorer that our old urls from the old site still exists and many have high page authority. The urls all redirected currently to a 404 page and it is not possible to retrieve the old information For example this page http://www.featuredeco.co.uk/mall/departmentpage.cfm/FeatureDeco/_71989/1 This has a page authority of 32. Is it possible to retrieve the link juice from these pages and channel it on the Kind regards Paul
Link Building | | prano0 -
Rel="canonical" or text link?
Lets say I have a commercial website that nobody will link to so I create a non commercial website with some awesome content that is highly linkable. I then get 30 - 40 quality links pointing to this site which I then either rel ="canonical" back to my main site to the page with the replica content or do I simply add a text link from the new site to the old sites homepage. Which would benefit my commercial site most? We are seeing the strategy of building a non commercial site for links becoming more and more popular. The second question is is it worth the effort for in effect one backlink?
Link Building | | fazza470