Second anchor text on page. Does it count?

[Stramark]

Back in 2008 there was "proof" that the anchor text of a second link on a page would not be counted for the anchor text.
In the MOZ starter guide it is still advocated: https://moz.com/learn/seo/anchor-text

BUT in 2014 it was reported on searchengine land:
http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-one-page-two-links-page-counted-first-link-192718
That the second link might be counted. Direct link to the matt cuts video from 28 may 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AsLWIuNNMU

(Even in 2010 there where already some different opinions and work arounds.
https://moz.com/blog/the-first-link-counts-rule-and-the-hash-sign
https://moz.com/ugc/3-ways-to-avoid-the-first-link-counts-rule (2011) 

Question: did anyone recently test this recently?

The deeper questions are:
1:is the LINK value counted if you have more that one link on a page to another page?
2: is the Anchor text counted if you have more than one anchortext to another page?

The most interresting i have is that i have a menu from which i link to my important pages. Does it help to put extra links in the content to specific pages?

[emerald]

Hi Stramark,
How did you get on in your testing? Just wondering what the latest on this is for 2015-2016?

Thanks.

[Stramark]

I have done a test of my own.

I used a very important page on my website.
The page has not been changed for more than 2 months.
The page has a link from the main menu with the money keyword "zoekmachine marketing" 
I used the blogpart of my website to add 5 extra links like this: https://www.stramark.nl/zoekmachine-marketing/#4-p-zoekmachine-marketing

I ran the keyword ranking on the specific anchor text on the 9th of july, and today again.

The result is significantly positive. I will monitor for a few extra days

0ivec1h.jpg

[RyanPurkey]

This is also a question of usability / user experience. If your page incorporating in-article anchor links is laid out well and has engaged users clicking those links to explore the different sections of the page, you're likely getting a lower bounce rate and better numbers in-terms of users bouncing back to the search results from your page.

In ATPs case, those links were likely causing navigational confusion and/or potential keyword stuffing flags. Cleaning them up served his site better.

In either case, I don't think it's a simple question of solely how many links count, especially in real world usage.  Cheers!

[ATP]

Hi Stramark,

This is an interesting debate that I have tried to test myself to some extent and found some mixed results.

A site I took over had category pages linked off the home page in 3 locations, the main nav bar, in the content, and in the footer. The anchor text was different in all 3. I made relatively minor changes but the main one was to make the anchor text the same and remove the footer links. (Basically avoiding any threat of being tagged for spammy links with different keywords)

3 Out of the 8 or so categories saw visible improvements with the removal and standardisation of the anchor text. Very few other changes were made to these pages or the site.

This change leads me to believe that not only can more than 1 link have an impact, but different anchor text on the multiple links also can, multiple links are not simply ignored. However, The big debate i guess is whether that is a good or bad impact, since cleaning them up and removing them helped my pages.