Wasted Links on Your Pages

Did you know that having multiple links on a page that point to the same url can actually hurt you?

In saying this, I’m assuming you understand some basic concepts…

Google assigns a numerical Page Rank value to each and every URL based on the quantity, quality and relevence of the links which point to it.

That “link juice”, if you will, gets passed through those links to each of their destinations, with some additional “relevance” which gets assigned through the anchor text from the surrounding text, through the Alt image tags, and some say, even the image title tag.

Whatever the PR value is, Google forces 86% of it to “flow through” or “pass along” to the rest of the links on that page, both internal and external.

This of course, means that the more links there are on a page, the less PR there is available overall, getting passed through each one – so, in other words, yes, the more links that exist actually “hurt” each of the other links, and nofollowing them doesn’t help either!

Nofollow – The Changing Rule
A nofollowed link allows you to prevent link juice from flowing where you dont want it to go, hence the term “link condom”.

Originally intended to minimize blog spam, clever search marketers realized that by nofollowing certain links on a page, you could then channel the extra link juice exactly where you wanted it to go – i.e. to your most valuable pages, and only through good anchor text.  Hence the term, PageRank sculpting”.

In June of 2009, Matt Cutts of Google effectively announced an end to PR scuplting, while speaking to a group at SMX Advanced in Seattle.

He explained that they were no longer allow the unused PR to be refocused elsewhere, and when asked “What happens to the PR of a link which you’ve nofollowed?”, Matt replied, “Think of it as, “evaporating”.

Yes he did say “evaporating”, and I was sitting right there!

That Changed My Thinking
This drastic revelation changed the way many people looked at copywriting, site structure, and even link building in general..

Looking around the web, you’ll often find multiple links in articles, which is great. Internal links move the spiders around your site, and it’s great to share the link love externally.

However, what I also see a lot of, and the whole point of this article, are multiple links to the identical URL using different anchor text, and that’s something that should be avoided.

Only One Link Counts?
Only the very first instance encountered of a link to a URL, either image or text, followed or no followed, will pass relevance.

Yes you read that correctly, and although it’s been widely publicized and it’s been that way for quite a while, and plenty of testing has been done to “prove” it, there are still a lot of people getting it wrong.

Whichever link the search spider comes across first, is considered to be the “winner”, and all the fame, glory, and link juice relevance gets passed through that first one – all the others are ignored.

Now that you know that multiple instances of links to identical URLs are completely useless, you have to see how they can also actually harm you, right? Each link decreases the overall amount of page rank you have to flow through that page.

Remember as Matt put it, that extra link juice “evaporates”, so why would you allow very many of those to just suck more life out of your page?

Yet as you bounce around the web, it’s not uncommon to realize that there are an awful lot of confused people out there, who didn’t get the memo.

How many websites are there which have a big image link at the very top left of the page, which points to “home”, yet in the footer, they link back to the main domain name gain?

How many blog posts get written with text links to their most desirable areas, which also happen to be in the upper navigation?

How many websites have multiple links in the footer of their website which were placed there out of “tradition”, but now exist merely to bleed off value?

Remember a couple of years ago when you may have added nofollow to some of them, like privacy, security, contact, etc.?  How much stronger might every single page on your site be, and how much juice might you pass along internally, simply by cleaning out that footer and your sidebars?

How many articles get submitted to the article directories where multiple links are allowed, but there are replicated links in the content, and in the author bio. What a waste!

Think carefully about where you’re linking to, and examine your navigation, sidebars and footers for unnecessary and potentially “damaging” links, and your site can be even more seductive.