Link Location Still Making That Much Difference?
-
I got to thinking earlier... I know obviously footer links are always going to be the bottom of the barrel but does the rest of block level analysis still mean as much... I mean, everybody went nuts with getting in-content links only so there's a billion and one badly written spammy blogs with useless content on just for the sake of getting in-content links instead of blogroll/sidebar links. I just wonder if maybe due to that, things might have levelled out a bit for link location and we hadn't noticed... or at least there's not been much discussion over it lately.
Thoughts anyone?
-
Yeah that does clear things up in my head... do you think it's always the case though. I mean with blogs yeah I reckon it is massively, but on normal informational sites you tend to see a lot of links to "useful information" types stuff in sidebars... i.e. A website about planning permission for houses that would link to the local council for regulations, etc...
I'm just wondering if the slurry of poor content blogs with contextual links that ensued the discussions on block level a few years back has resulted in the whole idea being scaled back.
Again I would rule out the footer altogether as it will I'm sure always be considered a place where no decent link would be put. But to me, a sidebar link could be of more importance to the user than one within the content... in a sense like it's more something a site is offering users to see, standing out from the content if that makes sense.
Kind of like what you said with the list of great resources, would you usually find that in the content window? I often see them in the sidebar.
Just to clarify though, I think "When crap links to crap the position of the link does not matter." is totally right but would you say "When quality links to quality the position of the link does not matter." was absolutely the case, or do you think it does matter a bit, just not loads?
-
Well put. even if placement did not matter, I believe contextual links would have an advantage being surounded by content showing relevance, rather than being plonked somewhere
-
When crap links to crap the position of the link does not matter.
When quality links to quality the position of the link does not matter.
That is an oversimplification but think of it like this.... when a quality website gives a meritorious link to another website, they usually don't put it in their footer or in their header or in their side navigation. Instead they link to it within a blog post or within an article or within a list of great resources. All of these are in the content window of the site.
-
I think the thing is most of the sites which spam links within content google will just look at the number of links on the specific page.
If you have a blog with 30 low quality articles and each post has like 5 links within the content it is not going to pass much value.
I mean I still see websites with 100's of root domain links in the footer of their clients and they are still doing well, the thing is because they have a low number of out going links.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Having problem with multiple ccTLD sites, SERP showing different sites on different region
Hi everyone, We have more than 20 websites for different region and all the sites have their specific ccTLD. The thing is we are having conflict in SERP for our English sites and almost all the English sites have the same content I would say 70% of the content is duplicating. Despite having a proper hreflang, I see co.uk results in (Google US) and not only .co.uk but also other sites are showing up (xyz.in, xyz.ie, xyz.com.au)The tags I'm using are below, if the site is for the US I'm using canonical and hreflang tag :https://www.xyz.us/" />https://www.xyz.us/" hreflang="en-us" />and for the UK siteshttps://www.xyz.co.uk/" />https://www.xyz.co.uk/" hreflang="en-gb" />I know we have ccTLD so we don't have to use hreflang but since we have duplicate content so just to be safe we added hreflang and what I have heard/read that there is no harm if you have hreflang (of course If implemented properly).Am I doing something wrong here? Or is it conflicting due to canonicals for the same content on different regions and we are confusing Google so (Google showing the most authoritative and relevant results)Really need help with this.Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shahryar890 -
Links: Links come from bizzare pages
Hi all, My question is related to links that I saw in Google Search Console. While looking at who is linking to my site, I saw that GSC has some links that are coming from third party websites but these third party webpages are not indexed and not even put up by their owners. It looks like the owner never created these pages, these pages are not indexed (when you do a site: search in Google) but the URL of these pages loads content in the browser. Example - www.samplesite1.com/fakefolder/fakeurl what exactly is this thing? To mention more details, the third party website in question is a Wordpress website and I guess is probably hijacked. But how does one even get these types pages/URLs up and running on someone else's website and then link out to other websites. I am concerned as the content that I am getting link from is adult content and I will have to do some link cleansing soon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
To Many Links On Page Problem
Hello My Moz report is showing I have an error for too many links on my sitemap and blog. The links on both pages are relevant and I'm not sure if this has to be sorted out, as I would have thought Google would expect sitemaps and blogs to have lots of links. If I were to reduce the number of links how much of a positive affect would it have on my site? If any of you feel it is best practice to reduce number of links on these particular pages, do you have any suggestions on how I can tackle this? http://www.dradept.com/blog.php http://www.dradept.com/sitemap.php Thank you Christina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChristinaRadisic0 -
Links from new sites with no link juice
Hi Guys, Do backlinks from a bunch of new sites pass any value to our site? I've heard a lot from some "SEO experts" say that it is an effective link building strategy to build a bunch of new sites and link them to our main site. I highly doubt that... To me, a new site is a new site, which means it won't have any backlinks in the beginning (most likely), so a backlink from this site won't pass too much link juice. Right? In my humble opinion this is not a good strategy any more...if you build new sites for the sake of getting links. This is just wrong. But, if you do have some unique content and you want to share with others on that particular topic, then you can definitely create a blog and write content and start getting links. And over time, the domain authority will increase, then a backlink from this site will become more valuable? I am not a SEO expert myself, so I am eager to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | witmartmarketing0 -
Sites interlinked - how much changes to make at one time
Hello, A client has their main site interlinked with 3 other of their sites. The main site is not ranked as high as it should for the main term, which the the anchor text used in all 3 interlinking sites. They're having a main sitewide link changed to nofollows today. Should we worry about doing too much at the same time? I'm thinking about either taking off the interlinking or changing it to brand anchor text.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Link from archived article.
A strong news site has an "archived.domainname" folder, where they have older articles listed. I can get a link on a page where there is a 4 year old article, which will be in this archived sub-domain. My questions: Will Google view a link from a 4 year old article as less valuable. Will Google notice the article is 4 years old and find it odd why the page all of a sudden has a link to my site, and thus devalue such link the sub-domain "archived" does that tell Google it is old and a link will be less valuable thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
Best internal linking structure?
We are considering implementing a site-wide contextual linking structure. Does anyone have some good guidelines / blog posts on this topic? Our site is quite (over 1 million pages), so the contextual linking would be automated, but we need to define a set of rules. Basically, if we have a great page on 'healthy recipes,' should we make every instance of the word 'healthy recipes' link back to that page, or should we limit it to a certain number of pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Dynamic Links vs Static Links
There are under 100 pages that we are trying to rank for and we'd like to flatten our site architecture to give them more link juice. One of the methods that is currently in place now is a widget that dynamically links to these pages based on page popularity...the list of links could change day to day. We are thinking of redesigning the page to become more static, as we believe it's better for link juice to flow to those pages reliably than dynamically. Before we do so, we need a second opinion.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RBA0