Google assesses only the first linktext

Johannes Beus
Felt like you just had a déjà vu reading the headlines? You are correct, Rand blogged a while ago that if there are more than one link on a page pointing to another page, Google will only assess the first linktext. Surprisingly this led to next to no echo in the German SEO-scene, Jens was the only one who wrote something about it.

Since Rand was sadly unable/unwilling to give an example I came up with a small test myself. I added a destination-page with two differing link-texts which were not yet indexed in Google („adbd2a4b0c19f376972e8c“ and „b6651c89c88407b6e66eeb“) on the lower right hand corner here on the blog. After waiting a few weeks for Google to update their backlink-data and what do you know, it seems to be true. When searching for the first linktext both linked and linking site are found:


When searching for the second linktext I only get the linking page, in this case the homepage for this blog:

If we take a look at the cached versions of the destination-page for the first search we can see that we can also say “These terms only show up in links who point to this site: adbd2a4b0c19f376972e8c”.

This realization should have consequences especially for the composition and regulation of the internal link-structure for extensive websites. In those cases you often have links to navigational pages more than once and just as often you do not always have the first linktext as the significant one.
Johannes Beus - on Sat (04/12/2008) at 12:16 PM

Add Comment

more
This posting is older than 30 days and therefore closed for new comments.