Suffice to say that it will weaken the effect of both links.

I actually thing the second link will be discounted completely

No the second one will not be discounted completely, I can assure you of that. It will weaken both by a LOT more than 50% each though.

Thanks for that info OWG.

To clarify my reasoning (nothing worse than someone saying 'because I said so')

Imagine being in a room with someone who is reading a book. You ask them. " what book is that your reading?" They say " it is a medical dictionary" . a few minutes later someone else asks them the same question " what book is that your reading?" This time they say " it is a book about liver disease!

Wouldn't you think to yourself ' hang on he told me it was a medical dictionary, now he says it is a book about liver disease, something is not quite right there.

Same with search engines.

Now if you link to different pages on the smae site, with different anchor text, then the reverse is true, because you would expect the links to carry different anchor text, as they are different pages. BUT you would ALSO expect the anchor text to be semantically linked. eg. (sticking with the book analogy above) medical dictionary would link to the medical dictionary section of the site, while the second link could link to the liver disease page.

two links to the same SITE, completely different anchor text, but BOTH semantically linked, and so both being treated equally, with NEITHER losing weight or link benefit.

Hope that has cleared up the reasoning. It should also have illustrated the importance of having on topic niche sites, or sections of sites.

The reasoning clears things up nicely, thanks

Originally Posted by OldWelshGuy

Suffice to say that it will weaken the effect of both links.

...so it is not a good ideal to have the same url on a link page.

Internal linking abo****ely no problem. Have a hundred if it makes sense.

Originally Posted by OldWelshGuy

Internal linking abo****ely no problem. Have a hundred if it makes sense.

Have said this James, can you shed lights on the optimum way to do internal linking, it should not be haphazard I am sure, this worth a post/article on itself, I once read an article on this at UKWebmasterWorld.com, any change of a quick post on this subject James?