Last year Rand Fishkin wrote about Link Consolidation as the new PageRank sculpting.

He said:

"Put simply, consolidation is the practice of minimizing the number of pages that are linked to by consolidating content onto fewer pages."

and showed us this scheme:

Using this method helps you to reduce the number of pages you link to from 6 to 1. It is based on the assumption that Google will treat all of these urls as if they referred to the same page. For example, if you link to domain.com/about.html#contact, Google will index domain.com/about.html and will ignore other signs in url starting from #.

OK, so now you have 6 urls referring to the same page. Remember the "first link counts" rule? It says that it such a situation Google will follow the anchor text of only the first link. Since now there have been at least 2 exceptions from this rule:

• if you place 2 links to the same page and one of them is the text link but the other - the graphic one, Google will count the anchor text of the text link regardless of their order;

• if you place 2 text links to the same page and the first one is nofollowed link, there may occur some problems with indexation of such a page.

How do you think will Google behave this time?

I decided to check whether the "first link counts" rule reffers to links with the hash sign or not. I placed 2 links with # on http://www.lexy.com.pl/blog/first-link-counts/ (test no. 7) and waited for Google to find them. To be honest, I was sure it would count only the first one, as usual, so the results of this test surprised me a bit - Google is showing the page for both anchor texts.

To be sure about the results of the test, I repeated it on another website but this time there were 3 links:

• the first one was a standard link to domain.com/page1;

• the second and the third one directed to different sections of domain.com/page1 with the use of #.

The results were the same and now Google is showing the page for 3 different anchor texts. It means there's another exception of the "first link counts" rule and you can put multiple links on document A to document B and Google will count all of their anchor texts.

So, if Google doesn't treat such urls as 1 link, can it influence the PR sculpting by Link Consolidation?