2 links on home page to each category page ..... is page rank being watered down?

[QubaSEO]

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

[MatthewBarby]

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.

[QubaSEO]

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?

[Copstead]

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

[MatthewBarby]

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.

[QubaSEO]

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.