Anchor Text

[Hazo]

Does is dilute the value of the link if you are receiving a link from a page that already has another outgoing link with the same anchor?

[PokerFelts]

Hi,

In my opinion, choosing an anchor that has already been used on a site is a bad decision and not many website owners would be willing to give out the same anchor text.

Its more advisable to mix your anchor text up a little so that you are targetting different areas within your site.

But thats my opinion, guess the decision is yours...

[Hazo]

Well I was actually given a directory link witht the same anchor as another link. I'm wondering if I should contact then to get it changed, even though it is my desired anchor.

The same question would apply to a regular page on a website.

[Scott]

I probably wouldn't worry about it if it's a directory because it's bound to happen if you're targeting competitive keywords, but when on a regular website I would try to have different anchors then the other links which isn't difficult since you should be using different anchors anyways so all you need to do is make sure you choose an anchor not currently present on the website.

-Scott

[PokerReviews]

Anchors should be different on regular websites while linking because of the competitiveness of the terms.

[Michael Martinez]

You cannot dilute anchor text by reusing it for multiple outbound links. However, the more outbound links with similar anchor text, the more relevant the linking page becomes to the anchor text.

[Trikkur]

What happens when this situation is reversed and you are linking to the SAME page twice with different anchor texts? Does that site get 2x the PR flow of the other pages that your linking to? Does it negate the 2nd anchor text? I have always avoided this, but wasn't sure what actually happens.

[Michael Martinez]

It is impossible to measure the flow of PageRank from page to page (or site to site).

In some rare examples, I have been able to get anchor text from two links on the same page to pass to a destination page. Other people in the SEO industry have been unable to do that (at least, those who publicly discuss the test claim failure).

I feel that if a high-value, trusted domain provides 2 links on the same page to another trusted, high-value domain, it will probably pass the anchor text from both links.

Generally speaking, it is assumed that if a link passes anchor text it should also be passing PageRank.

PageRank, while not really important for achieving search rankings success, does appear to be tied to determining whether a page is placed in the Main Web Index. It may also be tied to determining whether a domain or page should be trusted (but Trust appears to also be associated with Behavior, and is not dependent solely upon links).

This is really advanced theoretical ground and I don't believe most people would benefit from trying to figure out what works and what doesn't work.

Although I'm not very familiar with the poker-related query spaces, I believe most of the sites that achieve success through linkage are doing it through the anchor text and trust, and not through the PageRank.

It's a rare, rare, rare, RARE query that is decided by PageRank.


ON EDIT: In the CLASSIC PageRank algorithm definition, multiple links to the same destination were treated as a single link (if they were all on the same page).