Multiple anchor text links

[NikkiGaul]

Hi. I wanted to ask about having multiple text links to an internal page from the same page.

So I have a section title on my home page which will vary with each article. It may say "Healthiest Cat Foods" as the title then offer a snippet and finally offer a "continue reading..." anchor text.

The title is a great link to the article while the "continue reading..." is another link to the same article. I like the to keep the title link because it is perfect anchor text. I like to keep the "continue reading..." because it seems helpful for users.

I have read that search engines will only count the first link to an article which is fine as I only want the first one to count anyway. What I am wondering is do I lose any page rank because I added the second link? Does that second link hurt me in any way?

[HiveDigitalInc]

I no meaningful way will that second link harm you. Even if it did pass on equal amounts of PageRank, the minute volume would be inconsequential. Go ahead and do what is best for your users.

[JoeAmadon]

I agree with Russ that the second link won't hurt you. I believe that the "first link is the only one that counts" rule refers to the anchor text and not necessarily the passing of link juice.

[NikkiGaul]

Thank you both.

To clarify, there is no loss of page rank or anything? It seems the extra link counts on the SEOmoz toolbar and that confuses me. If you have 3 links on the page to the same URL why doesn't the tool only count it as one link?

[JoeAmadon]

You won't lose PR.

This is something that is most likely filtered out by search engines after a crawl. SEOmoz has probably just chosen not to implement such a filter.