Numerous duplicate destination URLs from within one menu - potential impact for on-page SEO?

[Hermski]

Hello all

What is your evaluation in regards to a number of links (different anchors) targeting the same destination URL from within one and the same menu (on the same website)?

Keeping it brief: Think of a top menu drop down entry, that needs to feature the alphabet (each letter has it's own sub-entries). However, the actual letter itself is not represented by a page (it has no URL either). So far so good. However, when testing the menu on a mobile device, the letter entries are still treated, as if they were non-existent pages - thus throwing a 404 when clicked.

In order to avoid people getting a 404 when clicking on any letter, it would be ideal, if they were directed to any main page (the same destination URL though). However, that would mean 26 times the same destination URL from within that menu. Is this approach potentially bad for SEO, hence there would be numerous duplicate destination URLs in place?

Please mind, I am not inquiring for help on how to arrange the actual menu. I am concerned about the impact, identical destination URLs could have on the on-page SEO.

Many thanks in advance for your help and input!

[DirkC]

Matt Cuts said literally about this that if this is your main concern, you should probably take one step back and see if there are not some more important issues to resolve regarding your SEO strategy like page speed, usability issues, ...etc. Full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AsLWIuNNMU&t=11

According to an (old) study on Moz (http://moz.com/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts) - apparently only the first link is counted (in terms of anchor text). Matt Cuts mentioned this in the video as well, but wasn't sure if this was still the case today (last time he checked was 20009).

An older question also adresses the same topic (http://moz.com/community/q/is-there-a-seo-penalty-for-multi-links-on-same-page-going-to-same-destination-page) - answers seem to agree that there is no SEO penalty.

So to answer your question - I wouldn't really have big concerns about having multiple links to the same page. Must say that based on the description you give, I worry a bit about the usability of this menu.

rgds,

Dirk