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It's Only The First Link That Counts

If you have a Web page with multiple links to another page on it, chances are, Google is only going to pay attention to the very first link it crawls. You can change the anchor tags, nofollow the first link, or otherwise try to get the "juice" to flow differently, but according to a field test by Branko Rihtman, the first link to a new domain is the only one that really counts.

Rihtman's test actually piggybacks on a theory Rand Fishkin posed in an SEOmoz post back in March, but offers some concrete evidence that the first link on each page carries all the weight. He tested one start page with two links to the same destination page, and found that Google only indexed the first link. Even with a nofollow tag, the giant's spider still picked up the initial link and ignored the second.

Read the whole story at SEO Scientist »

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