Settle an argument re first links from a page? Anyone?

[AidanMcCarthy]

If we accept "the first link from a page to another is the one that transfers anchor text and PR" - does that then apply just the same for internal linking as it does with linking from domain to domain?

[EGOL]

Instead of building links I am building content assets - even for retail sites... http://www.seomoz.org/blog/throwing-out-the-book-on-seo

[SteveOllington]

".... I am betting all of my money on links being rapidly depreciating assets."

That terrifies me, I'm not kidding I lose sleep over thinking about that regularly.

[EGOL]

Lots of people say that the first link on a page is what google counts.... but really.... which do you think Google would consider more relevant... a link in the first paragraph of an article or a link in the bottom of the left navigation column.  The nav link would be normally higher in the code, but the paragraph link would be higher on the page.  However, don't you think that the paragraph link would be higher in relevance but the nav link would indicate it might be  higher in the heirarchy of the site.

I am going to spend all of my time working on content and let the links appear where they naturally fall.  What people talk about and what google does could be two different things and what google does tomorrow could be entirely different from what they are doing today.... (and we know a few instances of what google says they are doing being entirely different from what they really are doing).

To close the rant.... I am betting all of my money on links being rapidly depreciating assets.

[RyanKent]

What we know is anchor text from the first link is associated with the target page, while the anchor text from additional links to the same URL are not valued (from the same page).

It is debated as to how Google handles additional links to the same page. For example, if you have 100 links on a page with 1 of them being to your /about-us page, you may or may not have the same amount of PR flowing to the page as if you had 100 links on the page with 3 of them pointed to your /about-us page.

Some SEOs feel more links = more PR flow while others feel Google will discount the additional links in a similar manner to how they discount the anchor text. Until a definitive response from Google is shared, we wont know for certain.

Either way, I am not aware of any reason why the PR flow would check whether the link was internal or external. Is it possible Google offers a different decay rate or valuation of internal vs external links? Yes. Once again it's one of those things we would need an official response from Google to be sure.