(Entry was posted by Lars NÃ¸rgaard Graverse on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 09/27/2018).

Multiple links to the same page located on one page

Will multiple links to the same page/source located on the one page hurt internal rankings? Example: On a front page - due to responsive web design - the code always contains three layouts (Desktop, Tablet, Mobile) All layouts have a link to /category/product-1. so this link will in the code appear 3 times but will only be visible for the user once. Will these links be seen as an attempt to manipulate internal links or is Google smart enough to only read and assign value to links crawled with the active user agent used during the crawl. Notes:
- The link and anchor text is always the same in the different layouts. - Different types of crawler all count the internal links as being 3 links disregarding the user agent defined for the crawl.

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Ash Nallawalla: Short answer is no. I work for a large brand where we had this situation for a while. It was fixed not to have a different version for each device and it made no noticeable change to traffic, rankings, or conversion.
Dave Elliott: Google will either crawl the desktop or mobile version of the site(depending if you`ve switched over to mobile first) if all three links are not present in the DOM you will be fine, ...even if they are Google is pretty smart these days so should work it out!....btw, being a pedant i will point out that if you have three different layouts you are not on a responsive website, but an adaptive one!
George G.: No worries. Google will count only the 1st link that it sees to that page. Make sure your css is not blocked by the robots file.
Adam John Humphreys: Responsive site is just columns adjusting to browser size. What you are talking about is not responsive.