Quick SEO Tip - Squeezin’ Link Juice
photo credit: orngejuglr
In a recent post on SEOmoz “…Only the First Anchor Text Counts” Rand Fishkin relates an experiment and the conclusion that for a given web page only the first link pointing to another page counts toward Google pagerank. In other words you could have 50 links on your page all with different anchor text, all pointing to the same document, and it wouldn’t count any more than if there were only one - the first one that Googlebot finds on the page. All of the rest are just so much content text according to Rand.
As is often the case on SEOmoz the comments contained what I consider to be a real gem:
As I work on loads of small sites with 5 - 10 pages, I tried all sorts of bits and pieces - my mistake was to assume that the the anchor text in a top horizontal navigation count the most - this clears it up.
Say for example I am targeting “prostate cancer surgery” for one client - if I dont have a 100% relevant URL, then I make sure that the top horizontal navigation has a text link with those words linked to a page that has strong content centered around that phrase and the URL matches perfectly.
I tried this with a range of pages and it always worked.
Your post kind of clears up why.
There’s some degree of controversy among SEOs about which is a stronger link - one in the editorial content, or one in a global element such as the main navigation. So use your own judgement, because there are good logical arguments for both positions - and Google ain’t talking. However it’s usually going to be a lot easier to add a bunch of identical links to your site by incorporating it into a global element.
So here’s the light bulb that went off in my head: Want to give a page a boost? Craft your best relevant anchor text - exactly matching the URL and main key phrase of the target page - and put a link to it in a global element such as the top navigation found in Wordpress - Presentation>>Theme Editor>header.php. This should result in sending about as much link juice to the target page as your site is capable of.
This also means that you might want to take a good look at your global elements and make sure that you want to spread the joy to every thing that you have in there, and if you don’t then get to work adding nofollows (define) to some of it.
These strategies are sometimes called siloing or pagerank sculpting in SEO speak by the way. Here’s a timely article about pagerank sculpting and the controversy around it.
Needless to say you should get your on page elements and site wide structural SEO in order first .
Speaking of nofollowing - Joost deValk’s Robots Meta Plugin allows you to nofollow or noindex a page or post with one click from the WP editor page. This powerful plugin does much more than just that, and I highly recommend it if you want to control the flow of link juice through your site.
Discussion Area - Leave a Comment