Quick SEO Tip – Internal Linking

Hi guys,

I’m going to be starting a new quick tip series for the beginners out there, but there may be some use for the advanced SEO’s out there to maybe recap or spark some conversation. Today’s tip is the truth about internal linking.
Internal linking can be useful to improve information hierarchy, help spiders crawl and spread link juice around your site but it can sometimes be misunderstood when we bring search engine algorithms into the equation, take this HTML for example:
<h1><a href="www.doma.in">Company Name</a></h1>
<p>This is some seo content that is rich in keywords and then
we have a link like this <a href="www.doma.in">Keyword</a> that
creates our internal linking.</p>
This looks great and the link looks natural but how does Google or Bing see this?
If two links are pointing to the same page, according to Matt Cutt’s the first takes precedence. Meaning our link with the keyword anchor text in the content won’t be considered, pretty annoying right? You should take this into consideration when creating a website, if a link that you put in a page is already in the navigation it most likely won’t count. For some more guidence on this check our post on content layout optimisation and best practices.
So is there any secret fix?
There has been tests done previously on ways to get around this hurdle and one way was to add a hashtag to the end of link, for example:
<a href="www.doma.in/#1">Keyword</a>
What this basically does is tricks Google into thinking that the link is going to a different page but really the hash is just a fragment identifier that doesn’t exist, meaning logically both links would count. The success rate of this is rather sparse though and can’t be guaranteed, but why not try it?
I hope this quick tip helped you out in some way and if you have any suggestion for the next one let me know in the comments, cheers.