Combining adjacent image and text links

[mdeluk]

Hey,

The pages on one of our sites has a lot of links on it, which I have read a couple of times can be bad for SEO, although many say don't worry too much about it. However, I was thinking to reduce links and also reduce code size combining adjacent image and text links.

For example they current look like this:
"
Products page"

I am thinking maybe I should change to the following:
"Products page"

However, is this bad code and therefore could be bad for SEO? I have tried Googling this but couldn't seem to find anything on it.

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi There,

I used both your codes in my test to see how Google sees it, there is absolutely no difference as per browseseo.net. Instead, you should focus on getting an ALT tag and right Caption to get SEO value for the image.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

VJ

[effectdigital]

I think you're right to streamline your code, just for neatness! I'd do something more like this:

alt="Products Page">Products Page

It's just nice to work in some alt text to get higher relevance scores

The number of links you deploy per page depends upon the SEO authority of your site and individual web-pages. I am of course talking about PageRank which is still a leading factor in Google's ranking algorithms! Everyone knows that TBPR (Toolbar PageRank) is dead. That's the little metric you used to get on the Google toolbar for Firefox (before Chrome was created). This was a simplified version of PageRank and a rough indicator, which people misused (so Google took it away)

'Actual' PageRank (which SEOs have never seen) is still very much at large and operates, roughly along these principles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Here's an image to help you out:

https://d.pr/i/WsySN1.png

Basically web pages are referenced by other URLs across the web and gain PageRank. This gives a web page an amount of 'SEO authority' which travels along axioms of relevance (e.g: even a link from the world's biggest pet store, won't help a car insurance company to rank much higher). Links from web pages with higher authority and trust metrics, which are relevant to the target page (both in terms of linguistic semantics and actual usage) are worth more. Links from pages with low SEO authority which have low trust ratings, which are completely irrelevant (for users and search engines) are pointless at best (and may even have a negative impact)

The obvious implications of this knowledge are that, networking your site with other websites is a good way to raise rankings (so long as it is done properly and ethically, in an editorial manner - advertorial links don't count). That being said, these rules also hold true for the internal linking of your website! It's called PageRank, not DomainRank or SiteRank. Any time two pages link between each other (internally or externally) PageRank does flow

When one page links to another correctly, it loses some PageRank. A fraction of that PageRank is gained by the receiving web-page (unless no-follow tags are used, in which case the 'sending' page still loses some authority, but the 'receiving' page gains none - it's vented into cyberspace)

Many large, well-known sites use this to their advantage. Virgin have several expansive eCommerce driven web properties which leverage deep-linking menus and faceted navigational links to really push their long-tail traffic to its maximum! This serves them very well. That being said, Virgin have monstrous budgets, digital PR and corporate backing which you likely can't match

What's right for one site, can be totally wrong for another! If you have very little SEO authority and / or trust to begin with, then using too many internal site links can cause your homepage and category-level URLs to 'bleed out'. Think of it as, hooking up a complex water irrigation system (to feed a greenhouse of tomatoes) to a single bucket of water. All of the tomatoes receive one tiny drop of moisture, and die at basically the same time they would have - had no irrigation been attempted! But were that bucket confined to 2-3 tomato plants, they might survive a few weeks (even if the rest of the crops died). It's the same with internal linking, horses for courses and all that

Be careful when reading up on SEO theory as it's almost always highly contextual and applies to very specific situations only