Google’s Matt Cutts: One Page With Two Links To Same Page; We Counted The First Link

Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts posted a video today answering how does Google handle one page that has two links pointing to the same page. Does it pass PageRank the same way? How does Google handle the anchor text, if the anchor text differs.

In short, Mat Cutts said:

(1) PageRank flows to each link individually as it would any other link on the page, at least according to the original PageRank document.

(2) Anchor text may vary depending on time. Matt said, last time he looked, which was in 2009, they only counted the anchor text from the first link. But he said that may change that over time; in fact, he said it may not work that way now. This means, if you have two links to the same page from a specific page, but the anchor text in the first is different than the last, Google in 2009 would have used the first link’s anchor text.

In 2008, a Moz study reported this, claiming the first anchor text counts and the last does not. I am not sure if others have run this experiment again, but this is Google confirming that in 2009, it worked this way.

Here is the video:

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.