Part 2 from How You Link Matters to Google
Did you know that you might be diluting your link?
In this post we will discuss two way to totally dilute your linking efforts.
I. Reputation/Anchor text: We can use our exact targeted keyword in our links, but that may get somewhat redundant and unnatural looking to Google. So by varying the link text to your page (Google ranks pages not sites), you can stay more natural.
II. Deep linking: On that natural theme, does a site really only get links to its index page (home page)? Or would a site get links to a number of internal pages? Well so long as those pages are worthy of a link (meaning it has decent content) it most certainly would get links.
III URL Dilution / Canonical url:www.url.com,http://url.com,http://url.com/index.htm are technically all different websites, even though to us the viewer they are the same.Thus if you spread the links evenly amongst all three of the above you would be diluting your link juice. So pick one and try to link that way.
For instance I like to keep it a rule that we link to the www.url.com version. However, if you have a site like birdview all their urls are so: http://url.com/index.htm,so you would link to that version. Same with internal links. Keep your internal links consistent. In this Case my favorite version would be http://www.url.com/internalpage.htm.
For you folks who can get at your server level you can get your site to 301 redirect all your page variations to the version you want. So Google, Yahoo and Bing would see your versions as just one.
You can also use a new tag that Google, Yahoo, and Bing say that they support. The tag goes in your header section of your html on your page of your site. It would look like this:
REL="CANONICAL" href="http://www.url.com/page">
However, based on the track record of engines supporting a tag, then not, I would take the aforementioned linking advice very seriously.
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