Comment on Themed Text Links by SEO Dave.
I’m afraid you are only going to get one fair share of the PR from a page no matter how many links to one URL are there.
So if I had 20 links from this page to the home page, the home page will not receive 20 times the PR.
Though to be completely honest I’ve not run SEO tests on this, just commonsense tells me it will work this way.
I’m reasonably confident Google counts unique links when sharing PR. If a page has 100 links, but 30 are repeats (double menu for example) Google will treat the page as having 70 unique links from it and give each of those unique URLs 1/70th of the PR available to share.
I hope they do it that way :-)
So there is no PR benefit to linking to a page multiple times this way.
There are benefit in multiple links though.
Lets say you have a design that has to use the anchor text HOME for the home page link in the header. This is the worst anchor text you could possibly use (unless your after SERPs like “Home Mortgage” then it’s great anchor text).
Your stuck with one link with anchor text HOME. If we add another link with anchor text “SEO Services” Google will treat those 2 links as one link with the anchor text “HOME SEO Services”** and share the anchor text benefit over those three words: each word receives 1/3rd of the SEO benefit and since 2 are relevant keywords, we only waste 1/3rd of the benefit.
** For this to work you have to add #something to the end of the URL of the second link, Google won’t count the anchor text otherwise.
Still not perfect, but much better than having a link with home as the only anchor text. Add even more links with different anchor text and it will be shared further making the wasted anchor text benefit from using the word HOME practically negligible.
Add to this anchor text is also weighted more than standard body text on the page the anchor text is on and you can see linking out to relevant pages can help the linking out page a lot.
Basically a page about themed text links should link to other pages with the anchor text themed text links (and relevant phrases) even if it means linking to the same page 2 or more times.
David
