It’s been a while since I have checked out the SEOmoz blog, but since there has been a serious lack of interesting information being published on other sites (*cough*-Search Engine Land-*cough*), I decided to check in and see what Rand and friends were up to.

Now aside from having some of the most photogenic people in the search business working for them (I mean look at those profile photos - it’s like a geek modeling agency over there), SEOmoz tends to do a nice job of putting out actionable SEO advice, although mostly just for paying subscribers. Today though, I was excited to see some advice on the free site that discussed some recent test results from the Mozers.

In the post, Rand describes the findings of an experiment with the effectiveness of multiple links to the same URL coming from the same webpage. What they found was a bit of a surprise to me - when there are multiple links to a single URL on a webpage, Google only counts the first link on the page towards the distribution of both link juice and the anchor text of the link.

In the past I’ve always thought that each link passed link juice to the destination URLs on a webpage, duplicate or not. For example, if there was a webpage with five links on it, with 2 links to webpage A, 1 link to webpage B, 1 link to webpage C and 1 link to webpage D, I assumed that the following was true:

• webpage A would get 40% of the link juice from the page
• webpage B would get 20% of the link juice from the page
• webpage C would get 20% of the link juice from the page
• webpage D would get 20% of the link juice from the page

But based off of SEOmoz’s testing, the real link juice distribution would look like:

• webpage A would get 25% of the link juice from the page
• webpage B would get 25% of the link juice from the page
• webpage C would get 25% of the link juice from the page
• webpage D would get 25% of the link juice from the page

Rand also goes on to theorize that if there are two links to the same URL on a page, and the first of those two links (first in the code, not first in the display) has the rel=”nofollow” attribute on it, both links will be treated as “nofollow” links - even if the second link isn’t “nofollowed.”

Also, if both the links to the same URL could be followed, the first link on the page’s anchor text would be counted towards the topic keywords of the page being linked to, but the anchor text of the second link would not be counted toward the keyword topic.

Of course this was just a test, and the validity of the theory has been questioned a bit - but if you are actively sculpting the link juice on your site it may be a good idea to take a peek at the work you’ve been doing to make sure you aren’t invalidating any of your links because of duplication, anchor text placement, or nofollows on duplicate links.

Read the full post at SEOmoz for more, and make sure to scan through the comments for more discussion on the topic.

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