Interesting link experiment

I posted an interesting link experiment at SEO Lab recently: When do duplicate links count?

I’ve suspected for some time that if Google sees two links for the same URL on the same page, it will only count one of the links.

What the experiment so far suggests is quite interesting:

1. When Google sees two links to the same URL, it ignores the second link
2. When Google sees two links for the same keyword, it ignores the second link

This is quite interesting, not simply in terms of linking out to other sites, but also for internal link architecture.

For example, a keyword alt tag in your logo at present will appear to suffice for the purposes of Google, and that stuffing keywords in the “Home” link will probably not be relevant for Google.

Obviously, though, search engines are not static, and this result may yet change.