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First of all, great question. The problem is that anchor text optimization isn't tested nearly enough by search engine professionals, and that Google evolves quickly, so it's hard to know what the best practice is or what benefits can be gained by this type of tweaking. To address your individual examples, there is conflicting evidence. 1. This is correct 2. This experiment showed that both anchors would count in this example. But this experiment showed the opposite as did this one - indicating Google would index both anchors 3. A similar situation with this example. My best guess is all anchors would count, but it's hard to say. There are some nuances in your question worth exploring. We can't really say how Google will flow link juice through these 4 links. (my pure guess is that pure PageRank will be spread equal among the 2, but this is only speculation.) But more importantly, there are other factors that will determine the value of these links, including: Position on the page - Links higher up tend to pass more weight than links further down Navigation vs. Content links - Where links placed in the body of context carry more weight than boilerplate (repeated links) Context of the links. For example, a link contained within an advertising block may not carry very much weight. And more... This article by Rand lays it out pretty good. These factors have the potential to far outweigh traditional PageRank sculpting techniques you may consider. It's a fascinating area of study, and I hope we can quantify it better in the future with more experimentation.

Thanks, Alan, you captured the dilemma perfectly. UI is important and SEO is important, so how does one quantify the pros and cons of each in the planning stages of a site. It's really kind of an educated guess. I tend to lean towards your assessment for all of the reasons you cite. I'm in a competitive keyword space. So while I put a lot of weight on UI issues, I'm not inclined to ignore SEO opportunities for just minimal UI gains.

Hi James, It sounds like when you consolidated widgets, you gave Google more of a focused page for persons to search for vs a larger number of pages on the same product.  This is interesting as it is the inverse of the long tail effect.  You would think that more pages around a given product would be better.  I guess this would be a search case where too many pages was a bad thing.  Makes me think of how we setup pagination to make sure Google does not focus on p 2,3,4,5 etc but work the noindexes to have focus on page 1 of the pagination. Thanks for the post!

Interesting approach, thank you.