Excessive internal anchor text

[adam westrop]

I have read around including such articles as:-

SEOmoz | Testing the Value of Anchor Text Optimized Internal Links

Which confirm that excessive internal anchor text doesnt really bring too much value.

Anyone with any further experience on this subject? It would seem that internal anchor text links are now dealt with like sitewide links and seem to have been heavily devalued?

[kikolani]

I read somewhere that if you have several internal links in one post, only the first one really "counts" towards the page. So if you're linking to the same page with several different keyword phrases, the first one gets the credit and the rest are useless (unless they are for reader value).

[dburk]

Hi Adam,

I would take the information from that particular article with a grain of salt. Rand is clearly using anecdotal evidence which by itself cannot be relied upon.

I will agree that you do not get much of a boost from using the exact same anchor text over and over from the same website, however a more sophisticated approach can pay off big time. Links from internal pages can be optimized for a variety of long tail keywords and you can help boost the rankings for many different keywords from internal links (i.e. Wikipedia). Additionally, Google seems to be sophisticated enough to allow the highest PR page to be the primary ranking influencer. So, more pages mean more opportunities to pickup natural backlinks and you don't have to figure out which page is the most powerful.