If a link is appearing more than once on a page, it will not pass PageRank value after the first time it appears. Use rel=”nofollow” to pass value with only your most valuable link.
Over at SEOmoz they did some testing on what happens when links appear twice on a page. Turns out that only the first link will pass value. Thank you Rand and your team for even thinking to test for something like this.
In the picture above, you will notice that the “Contact Us” link is crossed out. This means that it has a rel=”nofollow” on its anchor tag. This is because both of the links are pointing to our /contact/ folder. Without the rel=”nofollow” Google will “waste” PageRank juice on that second link.
Here is an example of the code.
Notice that the one I chose to leave open contains the phrase, “Get a Quote“. This is because those words are more valuable to the contact page (and the entire site) than the phrase, “Contact Us“.
Here are a couple cases in which this “no value passed” second linking can be an issue.
Links that appear both in the header and the footer.
If your site has a contact link in the header and also one in the footer, you are wasting one of those links. Also since this appears in both your header and footer, you should note that it is devaluing links on every page of your site.
Solution: rel=”nofollow” on one of the links.
Content rich page specific cross links to top level content are rendered useless.
If in one section of your site and you have a nice content rich link that is pointing a top level page, your header already took the credit for that page, rendering better link useless as far as page rank is concerned.
Solution: Although more complex, you may consider setting up your template in such a way that you can toggle a rel=”nofollow” via each instance. That is what we have done on our website. This way when we are linking to the products page via a link in a paragraph (which is better than a simple nav link), I can toggle the link in the header to insert a rel=”nofollow”. This is a custom feature we set up for our template system.
I’m sure that there are more cases that this can come up. Truth be told, there are many cases in which page rank does get waisted. Although in an ideal situation/timeline/budget we would be able to keep that from happening, sometimes its more cost effective to let a few double link pass. In the SEO community were is a real obsession with rel=”nofollow”. Lets make sure and use it well, but also to use it with discretion.
No comment yet
Don't be shy, express yourself ! ;)