SEO can be a quite complicated thing if you plunge your head into it. It is a very dynamic world where changes and updates happen regularly and there are lots of vagueness and speculation especially if the search engine companies have a “hush-hush” policy regarding this or that practice. One particular thing that’s interesting to talk about is the placement of links in websites and how they relate to the Google’s preference when it comes to their rankings. Links that direct users to internal or external sites have a significant impact on how Google looks at your website. Here’s what we gathered about what to do.
Bear in mind that many of what we have here for today are just our speculations regarding the best practices of SEO based on our personal experience plus a little bit of what we gathered from community discussions and consensus.
Make Your Links Visible
First, let’s start with the obvious. That is the most easily visible links in your website carry the most weight in Google’s consideration. You links should be accessible to many visitors. Packaging is the key, of course. So if you got teeny-weeny fonts, then that’s the way for your links to get overlooked. Try using bigger yet unobtrusive fonts for your links to get more traffic in and Google might just reward that.
Prioritize Content Links
The second thing you’d want to remember is that Content Links seem to be more attractive to Google. This means that if I get a link within the body of my content that directs users to other parts of the website, or say get the visitor to buy something, then Google actually counts this as a merit compared to when I point the users through the navigation section or the drop down menus you usually see on the sides or on the top of the pages.
Links in Footers are Doormats
Another thing you’d like to know is that links in footers, don’t carry much weight, if at all, as far as Google is concerned. What’s worse is that these links even often get devalued and dominated by the first links that come before them. So, if for some reason you really have to put links in footers, just make sure to have another link of it somewhere more visible, like in the navigation section or the content itself. This leads us to saying that…
Google Almost Always Seems to Prioritize the First Link
If you got links in the same page that point to the same URL, Google seems to credit the first link that can be seen by the eye starting from the top of the page. So, let’s say you got links to your products and services at the top of the page, say in the navigation section, and looking down towards the content body we see the same link directing us to the same product, then Google will see both of these links and prioritize the link on the navigation page rather than the one in the content.
