Header Links vs. In Page Links
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We have lost considerable rank for some of our top search terms (department names) and the rank loss correlates to a change we made on our homepage. That change was to remove a secondary navigation to the major departments in the content of our homepage. Now all we have is the global header navigation on the homepage (and all other pages on the site). I have read that in-page links pass more value than sitewide header links and I'm wondering if this is really true. These were text links (not linked images) and our header also contains text links (and some javascript). We did not make any other changes on our site at this time and this was not around the time of any major algorithm updates. The site is www.ebags.com.
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Here is a link to a screenshot: http://imgur.com/t0fIS
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I don't know if that did it or not... but I would put 'em back, give it a couple of months, and see what happens.
If there were no other changes then the logic behind this being the culprit is strong.
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Hi,
Do you have a version or a screen shot of the old format ? (as the drop in rankings still might not be correlated with those changes ).
But to answer your questions: Yes, the "real estate", the area, placement of the links within a page is very very important.
The lowest level are the footer links. Body, in content links are also split as importance in above the fold and under the fold. Side bar links are between the two (footer and body). Top and navigation links are very important.
Basically it's based on how a user can reach those and how much "call to action" those links hold - it make sense that top links are considered important as user will actually click on those - same with in content links.
For this reason - how people are clicking in those links - the number of link per page is also an important factor.
if you've removed some links - the other should and will send more Page Rank as the Page Rank (PR) of the page will be splited to a lower number overall.
We also had a similar issue when links moved in a different area of the page impacted, in a negative way several rankings for both the pages linked from the home pages (the ones that we've moved the links) and the home page it self.
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