The "100 links/page recommendation" - Do Duplicate Links Count?

[TalkInThePark]

We have way too many links on our homepage. The PageRank Link Juice Calculator (www.ecreativeim.com/pagerank-link-juice-calculator.php) counts them to 300.

But all of them are not unique, that is some links point to the same URL.

So my question: does the "100 links/page recommendation" refer to all anchors on the page or only to unique link target URLs?

I know "100" is just a standard recommendation.

[A_Q]

Hi,

Matt Cutts has said in the past that Google only counts the first link to a page. So if there are 3 links to your contact page, it will be the first one that is noted by Google (the first link in the code structure, not necessarily the order in which it appears on the page.

This video may give you more info...

I hope this helps!

Elias

watch?v=yYWlEItizjI

[TalkInThePark]

Yes. But do the other two links to our contact page dilute the link juice that gets passed on to other links on the page?

Would you not think those two duplicate links would be counted as "nofollow" links by Google and thereby dilute link juice?

[TalkInThePark]

Thanks for pointing me to the video, Elias.

If I understand Matt correctly, when having several links on a single page that point to the same destination URL, links 2-n will dilute PR.

[A_Q]

No, 'dilution' shouldn't be an issue - although this is opinion based on experience and obviously not from Google.

If there is legitimate reason for the links to be there then there shouldn't be a problem.

I wouldn't recommend nofollowing internal links and here's a great example of why http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4161726.htm

[A_Q]

No problem.

I think the latest link I've posted should help justify not implementing nofollows on internal links.

Would be interesting to hear about your results when you've chosen a course of action!

[TalkInThePark]

We do use nofollows on some internal links. Not for PR sculpting reasons, but for bot crawling reasons. There is no point in telling Gbot to crawl our buy button links.

[A_Q]

ok - might be better using the robots.txt file for that but I do see where you're coming from.

Elias