Video transcription
MATT CUTTS: Today’s question comes from Damien in London,who asks, “What impact would two links on a page pointing to the same target, each using different anchor text,have on the flow of PageRank?”
So this is kind of an example of what I think of as dancing on the head of a pin.
I’ll try to give you an answer.But if you’re telling me that the most important thing for your SEO strategy is knowing what two links from one page do– I understand if people are curious about it.
But you might want to step back and look at the higher mountaintop of SEO, and your SEO strategy, and the architecture of your site, and how is the user experience,and how is the speed of the site,and all that sort of stuff because this is sort of splitting hairs stuff.
So with that said, looking at the original PageRank paper, if you had two links from one page to another page,both links would flow PageRank.
And so the amount of page rank gets divided evenly in the original PageRank paper between all the outgoing links.
And so it’s the case that if two links both go to the same page,then twice as much page rank would go to that page.
That’s in the original PageRank paper.
If they have different anchor texts,well, that doesn’t affect the flow of PageRank, which is what your question was about.
But I’ll go ahead and try to answer how anchor text might flow.
So we have a link extraction process,which is, we look at all the links on the page and we extract those.
And then we annotate or affix them to the documents that they point to.
And that link extraction process can select all the links or it might just select one of the links or it might just select some of the links.
And that behavior changes over time.
So the last time I checked was 2009 and back then we might, for example, only have selected one of the links from a given page.
But again, this is the sort of thing where if you’re really worried about this as a factor in SEO,I think it’s probably worthwhile to take a step back and look at high-order bits, more important priorities like, how many of my users are actually making it through my funnel?
And are they finding good stuff that they really enjoy?
What is the design of my home page?
Do I need to refresh it because it’s starting to look a little stale after a few years?
All those kinds of things that are just generally good for users, that’s probably worth a lot more of your time and attention than thinking about the amount of PageRank or the anchor text that will flow from multiple links on a page.
But that’s the answer.
The answer is it can change over time. Back in 2009 , we might only select one, for example.
Hope that helps.
Quick Answer: The same division of PageRank applies as other links.