Multiple links to another page

[linked]

I have several words on my web site that link to another page,

ie.
<a href="otherPage.html">one</a>
<a href="otherPage.html">two</a>
<a href="otherPage.html">three</a>
<a href="otherPage.html">four</a>
<a href="otherPage.html">five</a>

<a href="anotherWebPage.html">Apple</a>
<a href="anotherWebPage.html">tomato</a>
<a href="anotherWebPage.html">candy</a>
<a href="anotherWebPage.html">celery</a>
<a href="anotherWebPage.html">toaster</a>

<a href="otherPage.html">one</a>
<a href="anotherWebPage.html">Apple</a>
<a href="otherPage.html">four</a>
<a href="otherPage.html">five</a>
<a href="anotherWebPage.html">celery</a>

Instead of writing the full .html page multiple times, does anyone know of another way to do it? The search engines probably think the above is spamming ...

[djr33]

Unless it's an excessive amount of circular linking, I don't see a problem. It's always possible to have multiple links to the same page. For example, you may have a shared navigation menu on all pages and on some pages you may have featured links such as "visit the home page".

However, I don't really understand the question. Either you have links, or you don't have links.

You could use a serverside language (like PHP) or a (serverside) templating system or CMS to automatically generate these links for you, but to a search engine it would look just like you'd written them by hand-- different pages with many links.

Alternatively you could try to hide them from search engines. There are two ways to do this.
1) You could make the links "no follow" for bots, suggesting that search engines ignore them. I don't know if you need to do this for SEO reasons, but it's certainly possible.
2) You could generate them using Javascript so that search engines would never see them. One easy way to do that would be to use Ajax to add them (from exernal pages) into the page after it loads. But that's usually the opposite of what you want-- you usually want to make pages more accessible, rather than less accessible. But if you want to hide the links from non-JS users and from bots, that's an easy way to do it.


Otherwise, the only other option is to rethink your design.

Why do you have so many links like that? Maybe you could combine them all into a single link. Or you could attach an onclick event to the element they're in (div/p/etc)-- in fact, that would make them share a link and also hide it from search engines because it's not technically a link.

If you want to take that idea one step further, you could always use "links" like this:
<a onclick="window.location='nextpage.htm';">My Link</a>
But that's not really a link-- for example, the cursor won't change to the "hand".


In general, it's bad to have too many identical pages with the same content. But I don't think that applies to having too many links to one page.

[linked]

<a onclick="window.location='nextpage.htm';">My Link</a>


Perfect! Thank you so much, that's exactly what I needed