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Michele Baldoni

Michele Baldoni

Link Building Secrets Revealed by Michele Baldoni and 10 of Today’s Best Link Builders.

Link Building Secrets 2012 - Michele Baldoni

Link Building On-page: How to Improve Theming of Internal Pages

As everybody knows, links on Web pages are very important for search engine optimization.  SEO techniques have quickly improved in recent years, allowing faster web-page indexing. One of the most popular and efficient of them is not always used in the proper way, reducing the potential results. I refer to the habits of placing, especially in the homepage, optimized links to internal pages.

An example of the incorrect application of this technique is shown in the screen shot below.

Michele Baldoni Link Building Secret

On this homepage has been placed two different links having the same href attribute (“/ferrari-rental.php”), an image that easily attracts the user’s attention and an optimized textual link inserted in the copy. The same procedure has been repeated for further three pictures shown in the page.

Recently, I completed a test proving that if, in a webpage, there are two or more links having the same URL in the href attribute, the spider (Googlebot in particular) follows only the first link found in the HTML code.

I also have verified that, if the first link is a “no follow” link, the spider does not use it and goes to the first “do follow” link. This is a scheme of the spider’s behavior:

  • Link 1 do follow + Link 2 do follow + Link 3 do follow =>  Theming B = Link 1 do follow
  • Link 1 do follow + Link 2 no follow + Link 3 do follow => Theming B = Link 1 do follow
  • Link 1 no follow+ Link 2 do follow + Link 3 do follow => Theming B = Link 2 do follow

Considering these test results, the linking strategy used for the website above is effective only for the page’s usability, but it is absolutely not efficient for the SEO. How then is it possible to optimize this important SEO strategy? I discovered during my test a method that allows you to increase both the page’s usability and its SEO efficiency. It consists of appending an anchor (#) at the end of the URL of the second do-follow link.

Links are, in this way, considered differently by the spider that follows both of them. With this simple trick, it is possible to have two links in the same page with different anchor text.

See below how to implement the code:

First link on page

<a href=”http://www.mydomain.com/internal-page.php”><img src=” /images/ferrari.jpg”></a>

Second link on page

<a href=”http://www.mydomain.com/internal-page.php#text”>Ferrari rental</a>

This solution is particularity useful, for example, when is not possible to modify the menu anchor text.

A similar method is to hang a parameter on the end of the URL (like page.php?a=text), but this will create duplicate content. With the use of anchors, despite the two different URLs and links the same resource we will not create duplicate content in search engine indexes.

Michele Baldoni
MBWeb
@dottorseo