First link importance in the content
-
Hi, have you guys an opinion on this point, mentioned by Matt Cutts in 2010 :
Matt made a point to mention that users are more likely to click on the first link in an article as opposed to a link at the bottom of the article. He said put your most important links at the top of the article. I believe it was Matt hinting to SEOs about this.
http://searchengineland.com/key-takeaways-from-googles-matt-cutts-talk-at-pubcon-55457
I've asked this in private and Michael Cottam told me he read a study a year ago that indicated that the link juice passed to other pages diminished the further down the page you go. But he can't find it anymore !
Do you remember this study and have the link ?
What is your opinion on Matt's point ?
-
Thanks for your answers, I think the first has more importance for Google, as it is for the user. Too bad the study can't be found anymore !
-
It also supports Google's "above the fold" algorithm update. Get your relevent content above the fold (links too). Think of the fold as the area of your monitor that you can see without scrolling down the page. That's why the top of page 1 pays the money and value diminishes as you go down the page.
Google ran a series of tests last year where AdWords in the right space on the page alternated with space at the bottom of the page. We structured AdWords to be at the top of the page on the right and were pissed off when they moved our ads to the bottom of the page. We wanted our ads to be seen without people having to scroll down the page.
Granted there's a lot of different monitors and Webmaster Central has tools for testing how pages look, but consider your own browsing habits.
People tend to take the path of least resistance (and viewer patience is growing shorter and shorter as the months go by).
-
Hi Baptiste
A good question.
Check out an awesome blog post from Rand from back in May 2010, entitled "All Links are Not Created Equal: 10 Illustrations on Search Engines' Valuation of Links" you'll see that Topic Number 1 provides some great information specific to your question.
I believe that on the whole (as in more times than not, but not always) visitors are more likely to click on the first link as opposed to the second, third...
As the most important content is often towards the beginning of a page's content, generally speaking, it's logical that the first link would be deemed more important than the second, third... Therefore the first link would pass on more of any available link juice.
Of course, relevance and context also play a part, there is no absolute answer one way or the other.
On a closely related topic of "multiple links", check out these two blog posts here on SEOmoz:
- Results of Google Experimentation - Only the First Anchor Text Counts
- 3 Ways to Avoid the First Link Counts Rule
In summary, "Google does not appear to count multiple links to the same target page from a single page", which I believe is still true today.
I hope that helps,
Regards
Simon
-
It makes sense to i would have to agree. When i comes to SEO logical is the way to go.
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
-
Breadcrumbs and internal links
Hello, I use to move up my site structure with links in content. I have now installed breadcrumbs, is it is useful to still keep the links in content or isn't there a need to duplicate those links ? and are the breadcrumbs links enough. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Same content, different languages. Duplicate content issue? | international SEO
Hi, If the "content" is the same, but is written in different languages, will Google see the articles as duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chalet
If google won't see it as duplicate content. What is the profit of implementing the alternate lang tag?Kind regards,Jeroen0 -
Cleaning up user generated nofollow broken links in content.
We have a question/answer section on our website, so it's user generated content. We've programmed all user generated links to be nofollow. Over time... we now have many broken links and some are even structurally invalid. Ex. 'http:///.'. I'm wanting to go in and clean up the links to improve user experience, but how do I justify it from an SEO standpoint and is it worth it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mysitesrock0 -
Is this ok for content on our site?
We run a printing company and as an example the grey box (at the bottom of the page) is what we have on each page http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html We used to use this but tried to get most of the content on the page, but we now want to add a bit more in-depth information to each page. The question i have is - would a 1200 word document be ok in there and not look bad to Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
PDF for link building - avoiding duplicate content
Hello, We've got an article that we're turning into a PDF. Both the article and the PDF will be on our site. This PDF is a good, thorough piece of content on how to choose a product. We're going to strip out all of the links to our in the article and create this PDF so that it will be good for people to reference and even print. Then we're going to do link building through outreach since people will find the article and PDF useful. My question is, how do I use rel="canonical" to make sure that the article and PDF aren't duplicate content? Thanks.
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 -
Can links indexed by google "link:" be bad? or this is like a good example by google
Can links indexed by google "link:" be bad? Or this is like a good example shown by google. We are cleaning our links from Penguin and dont know what to do with these ones. Some of them does not look quality.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0 -
Content Focus
I have a particular Page which shows primary contact details as well as "additional" contact details for the client. GIven I do not believe I want Google to misinterpret the focus of the page from the primary contact details which of the following three options would be best? Place the "additional" contact details (w/maps) in Javascript, Ajax or similar to suppress them from being crawled. Leave "additional" contact details alone but emphasize the Primary contact details by placing the Primary contact details in Rich Snippets/Microformats. Do nothing and allow Google to Crawl the pages with all contact details Thanks, Phil
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AU-SEO0