Single Source Page Link Test Using Multiple Links With Varying Anchor Text - Part Two
SEO, blogthropology, coding, nerdiness, web design October 25th, 2007
Back on October 9th, I blogged about a test I performed that demonstrated only the first link on a given page will count as far as ranking purposes go. In the thread where the test originated, pops (of TOONRefugee cartoon blog) asked what would happen if the first link were nofollowed. Since I had no clue, I decided to test that as well. Similar test as before, but checking the use of rel=”nofollow” on the initial link, and adding in a third link as a control:
Will revisit after the destination page is re-cached.
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8 Responses to “Single Source Page Link Test Using Multiple Links With Varying Anchor Text - Part Two”
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October 29th, 2007 at 1:57 am
[...] You can find more about his experiments and the results here at: Single Source Page Link Test Using Multiple Links With Varying Anchor Text - Part Two [...]
March 25th, 2008 at 3:14 am
So how about the results of this test? It looks like none of those links are making the physicsprimer site rank for the keywords, although of course this post ranks for them all. Does that mean that because the first link to the page is nofollowed, all the other links are being ignored too (ie dedupe first, nofollow second)? It’s important info for people considering using nofollow on their non-keyworded navigation to give value to their keyworded in-page links to the same pages.
May 3rd, 2008 at 12:11 pm
[...] *appears* that the first link you nofollow on a page *might* also nofollow any other link to the same url on that page, although nofollowing the home page link high up in code (when you [...]
June 21st, 2008 at 3:36 am
I still find this topic fascinating.
Search for anchor 1 returns both this and target page (interesting use of meta description there!). Even the more interesting given the nofollow on anchor 1…
Purposely not repeating the anchors in plain text.
Have you drawn any further conclusions on this Michael?
June 21st, 2008 at 8:41 am
Richard,
Yes, I meant to blog about this before, but was busy with some other things. The reason that the page currently shows for the first phrase is because for a while now (until very recently anyways) there were some followed links pointing to that page using that anchor text. This is due to a feature in MyBlogLog called “Hot In My Communities”. I believe all of them are gone, for now anyways, and am just waiting for the effects of the last one to drop off.
Today if you search in Yahoo for the phrase you can see only one instance of it in MyBlogLog, and if you click through to the live page you can see it is no longer there. However, if you look at Yahoo’s cache of that page you can see where it was (you have to click on the “Hot In My Communities” after clicking on the cache, that column is hidden by Javascript initially):
(click to enlarge)
What’s interesting to me about that is the fact that even though those links all appear to be gone in Google completely (ie. no MyBlogLog pages are showing up for that search now, although they were last time I checked), the target page still appears in the search results for now. So just as getting a link won’t instantly help your rankings, since it takes time to actually carry any weight, apparently losing them doesn’t instantly drop you either (which we all pretty much already knew, just neat to see the delay in action).
I expect it to drop off in a week or so, as long as that link doesn’t become popular to click on again.
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:41 am
Always the difficulty - control.
Two things from a big-picture perspective:
1. IMO this whole topic could have very deep ramifications for SEO;
2. I wouldn’t be surprised if this behaviour changes if it turns out to be supported by further testing. I say this because I think Google would rather us not know, and now that one more small signal is known they’ll be inclined to change it. I’m pretty sure they want to change their algo’s dependence on anchor text as this is where most abuse has focused of late.
I’d love to hear any follow-up findings on this.
Rgds
Richard
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:44 am
BTW - I think your captcha thingie is killing your subscribe to posts plugin. I got no email after you responded, and after my last comment the checkbox is unticked even though I seem to have been cookied correctly (my name/email are pre-populated).
Delete this to remove clutter
June 23rd, 2008 at 1:13 am
After reading this thread a few months ago and the other October one on a similar topic, I have chatted with several SEO agencies about this specific question. All of them give me a big blank stare when I describe the question and mumble in reply. So certainly this is not a well-known phenomenon.
I’ve done a little testing on this although nothing I’m quite ready to share, and have found the same to be true as what you showed in the other thread (that only the first anchor text counts). That said, site-wide navigation shared across all pages does not always seem to be counted as the “first” link on the page. Instead, it seems those links are sometimes ignored and the first link comes from the first non-navigation link in the code. Again, the tests I’ve done so far are not conclusive, but it seems like navigation that is shared across many pages may be getting discounted/ignored in this formula when it’s recognized as such. Has anyone else done any testing that involves both navigation links and in-page links?
also, anyone have any idea if there are differences between pages within the same domain linking to each other vs. across domains?