First Link on Page Still Only Link on Page?

[tylerfraser]

Bruce Clay and others did some research and found that the first link on the page is the most important and what is accredited as the link. Any other links on the page mean nothing. Is this still true?

And in that case, on an ecommerce site with category links in the top navigation (which is high on the code), is it not useful to link to categories in the content of the page? Because the category is already linked to on that page.

Thank you,

Tyler

[GlobeRunner]

Tyler, just so we're clear: it's the first TIME the link is mentioned on a page that counts, not just the first link on the page.

So, if you have several links on the same page to page1.html then only the first time counts--the other mentions (if they have different anchor text) don't count.

If you have a link that's useful (like a link to site's home page) then having the logo on your page link to your home page at the top is useful. Then, having a link on the sidebar to the home page might be useful for users, as well. Then there is the link to the home page in the footer. Those are all useful.

[TakeshiYoung]

The first mention of a link on a page is the most important in the sense that Google looks at the anchor text of the first link, so you want to make the first mention contain relevant anchor text instead of something generic.

That's not to say subsequent mentions of a link are useless. Every link on a page still gets PageRank distributed to it, so the more times you mention a link on the page, the more link value it's going to receive. Also, from a user perspective it can be helpful to have the same link repeated throughout the page in the body and footer, even if it's already in the top nav.