Duplicate internal links on page, any benefit to nofollow

[JustinTaylor88]

Link spam is naturally a hot topic amongst SEO's, particularly post Penguin. While digging around forums etc, I watched a video blog from Matt Cutts posted a while ago that suggests that Google only pays attention to the first instance of a link on the page

As most websites will have multiple instances of a links (header, footer and body text), is it beneficial to nofollow the additional instances of the link?

Also as the first instance of a link will in most cases be within the header nav, does that then make the content link text critical or can good on page optimisation be pulled from the title attribute?

I would appreciate the experiences and thoughts Mozzers thoughts on this

thanks in advance!

[Maximise]

I think they only pay attention to the anchor text of the first link, this would stop people from stuffing multiple links to the same page each targeting a different term. So if you have a few text links to the same page make sure the first one contains your primary key phrase.

Nofollowing the rest of the links wouldn't have any positive effect. The total link juice a page can pass on is divided by the total number of links on the page (regardless of follow or nofollow). In fact it can have a slightly negative effect as the juice from the nofollow links essentially evaporates instead of being passed to other pages on your site. Here is an article on how this works.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

[DeptAgency]

Hi Justin,

I think you raise a very good point. It is known that nofollow links 'leak' linkjuice, because the linkjuice is not passed through the link, but it isn't distributed to other links on the same page either. The juice that would have been passed through a follow link simply vanishes when you add a nofollow tag.

As you said it is also suggested that Google does not count multiple instances of one link on one page. So the question that remains is: Are the second, third etc. instances of links treated as nofollow links (leaking linkjuice), or are they simply ignored (not leaking linkjuice)?

If they are treated as nofollow links and leak linkjuice anyway, you might as well add a nofollow-tag and make sure you don't get penalized for them either. On the other hand, if they are normally simply ignored by Google, but start leaking linkjuice with a nofollow tag, you might be doing some serious damage to your site.

Quite frankly, I don't know which is the case. However, my gut feeling says that the pagerank sculpting days are over so the above reasoning might not be the way to think about this.

I would simply try not to 'overdo' anything to much. Don't have pages with 200+ links all linking to perfectly optimised pages with perfectly optimised anchors. I suspect that internal linking is not the driving factor behind Penguin penalties anyway, but backlinks are.

Looking forward to see what other people think!

Greets,

Sven Witteveen
Expand Online

[JustinTaylor88]

Thanks Maximise and Sven, both very informative answers.

I have changed the question to a discussion as it seems there may be no definitive answer  to the above, so look forward to hopefully seeing further input from the Moz community.