Hi Matt. If we add more than one links from page A to page B, do we pass more PageRank juice and additional anchor text info? Also can you tell us if links from A to A count?
STOP PRESS – All-round nice guy and official representative for Google published a a video recently telling us how Google USED to work according to the original Pagerank formula! :)
I suppose there’s a good attempt at explaining Pagerank in simple terms with fingers for those new to seo. Or at least, how it used to work. :) Let’s face it – Google Pagerank works differently than it used to.
He mentioned something like he ‘wasn’t going to get into anchor text flow’ (or as some call First Link Priority) – in this scenario, which is, actually, a much more interesting discussion.
Pity.
But the silence on anchor text and priority – or what counts and what doesn’t, is, perhaps, confirmation that Google has some sort of ‘link priority’ when spidering multiple links to a page from the same page and assigning relevance or ranking scores.
I’m pretty sure, from plenty of observations I’ve made in the past, that this is indeed the case. I have seen a few examples where I *thought* might contradict my own findings, but on closer examination, most could not be verified. It’s a lot harder today to isolate this sort of thing – but Google is designed that way.
I think, as the years go by – we’re supposed to forget how Google works under the hood of all that fancy GUI, BTW.
Simple answer, for me is, expect ONE link – the first link – out of multiple links on a single page pointing at one other page – to pass anchor text value. Follow that advice with your most important key phrases in at least the first link when creating multiple links and you don’t need to know about first link priority.
A quick seo test I did a long time ago throws up some interesting questions today – but the changes over the years at Google since I did my test will have an impact what is shown – and the fact is – the test environment was polluted long before now.
I still think about first link priority when creating links on a page.
It is possibly, a powerful good practice when inter-linking your pages.
I had hoped watching this video MC answered that point about anchor text. Maybe next time.
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Do let me know if you have a view on ‘first link priority’ – if you consider it – or if you think differently. If you have heard of MC talking about the flow of anchor text in this fashion – let me know – as I havent seen it…. I might even give this a test again.
If you don’t know, there are lots more of these videos for noobs at:
http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp
Want to know more about first link priority theories? It’s an interesting and sometimes hotly debated discussion – well, it used to be. Perhaps it is the case, the first link priority is not a short answer for MC to give, and by answering it, it opens a can of worms for him. The rule ITSELF probably has nuances, when nofollow is added to the mix, for instance, etc etc.
Interesting seo geek stuff anyway….
Multiple links from one page to a page considered as one. What about multiple links from one page to different pages of the same domain? That should be counted as two shouldn’t it?
The more common example of two links to the same page: my cool title lorem ipsum my cool post read more Of course, it makes sense that google should take the first link to a page over other links, because WordPress powers a 4th of the most important websites. And most CMS work like WordPress in this aspect.
Just to clarify, it is the ‘webpage’ and not the ‘website’ that counts when it comes to the 1st link priority? So two links would count as long as they were directed toward two different pages on the same site?
Yes. We are talking about when two links on the one page point to ONE other page. :)
Yes i check first link priority (logo image replacement anyone) and it astounds me how crappy some peoples menu systems are.
I like it simple – but mine is a bit too simple at the moment – I broke it before a big server crash a few months back and didn’t have the heart to set up all my tests again. :(
Hi Shaun, Would you say it would be best when creating a site to ensure the main navigation site links, such as top header and sidebar navigation will appear in the source code after the content? Because while for a lot of sites the most important pages are linked to from these main site wide navigation elements, they do not, or can’t use optimal anchor text. Would this make a difference?
I specifically tested it on this site before I broke it. :) I never saw any benefit TBH.
I heard tell once upon a day that using inpage style links can give you as many sets of anchour text to a page as you like. eg (on 1 page): link 1: “HOBO SEO” -> hobo-web.co.uk link 2: “SEO TRAMP” -> hobo-web.co.uk Only “HOBO SEO” would pass as anchour text. however: link 1: “HOBO SEO” -> hobo-web.co.uk link 2: “SEO TRAMP” -> hobo-web.co.uk#seo link 3: “SEO STEPTOE” -> hobo-web.co.uk#searchenegines etc Would pass all of the above text regardless of the order it is in. A few tests I did back in the day confirmed this. I imagine it work(ed?) due to how G were creating those “jump to” links in results. I suppose it could be a little grey hat if you don’t have the correct anchour points on the landing page, so it’s probably worth creating them – it’d be useful for the user anyway. This was a year or 2 ago btw, I don’t know exactly how relevant my results are today
yes I saw something like that on SEOMOZ a few years back too though I didnt have the time to confirm it.
I have played around with that a little – will let you know how it works long term. Another interesting thing is when there is an image ten a text link. At least for a long time the text link was counting, even when the image had alt text.
Hey Andy :) Yes I played about with it a lot – but never saw any real benefit worth the roi of redeveloping a template to put the content above the links in the navigation. Perhaps if the site was built that in way in the first place – it might be different. As a best practice – I kind of like my nav to be minimal and links within the text to be counted – so I DO usually ask for this on new sites.
But have you or anyone else tested the strength of a second link with different anchor to the same site via a 301, and how far could that be pushed until google got a bit annoyed. John
Bear in mind that a 301 passes just 3/4 of pagerank.
I have been doing SEO for well over a decade and I watch my metrics closely. When Google did the Mayday update last year, I believe they significantly altered the basic formula for PageRank. It seems that getting PR from linking pages no longer is a strict mathematical process (.85 x PR of page / # of links on page) but is now determined by the relevance between linked and linking pages. I base this on the fact that I built a new site just as Mayday came into effect and 4 months later it jumped to a PR4. When it did, I had 115 links. ONE on a PR5 page. ONE on a PR3 page. and 113 on PR0 pages All links were on pages containing relevant content. This could not be possible if relevance were not factored in the ranking process. best, Reg nbs-seo.com
Agreed. I used to launch PR 6 minisites in one update with one link. You cant do anything like that now. :)
HA! Didn’t we all?!? ;) Halcyon days :)
I have read so many different topics about this and have tested various sites and am still a bit confused about it. I think us SEO people all have our own little techniques, regardless of what we are led to believe by the big G!
I’ve run some test about this: I’ve found that only the first anchor text is passed, but you can use 3 ways to avoid this problem: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/3-ways-to-avoid-the-first-link-counts-rule the rule doesn’t apply to ALT of images http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk/first-link-counts-rule-and-alt-text.html I’m now running a test to try understanding which of the 3 way is better… (you can follow me on twitter – @zen2seo – if you are interested in the results…)
Cool I will if you come back and let me know the results :)
I’ll publicly share the results, on my site, a maybe via guest post: surely, following my twitter account you’ll know about them ;)
Cool :)
I have a question (maybe a little offtopic) :) I can´t remember where i heard about weight of the backlinks from same IPs. How does google treat backlinks from relevant sites, but on the same hosting and IP? Is it bad, are they a lot less worth, should I only do deep links, etc…???
Google won’t have a problem on the same IP unless you habe hundreds or thousands of websites all linking in from similar IPs. Matt Cutts said that a long time ago. But with everything, if you overdo it, you’ll probably get a light slap.
Just wanted to say thank you – these little tips are really helpful. I’m just getting started with SEO and the monster that is Google, so it’s much appreciated!