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Do you evaluate on-page link position when acquiring a link?

Posted by sam on March 3rd, 2008 View Comments
Posted in Uncategorized |

Over the last couple of years the trust of the website and page has been primary factor when evaluating the value of the link. Most of the people for simplicity use pagerank for evaluating how much benefit will give the link to their site. Bill from SEO by the SEA has just written an article how search engines are evaluating the links and content importance based on on-page factors.

The most important bits from Yahoo patent (and also from Microsoft research paper) are that search engines can and do create a visual model of the page to find out which is the “Most significant element”. Some of the factors that Yahoo confirms in the paper:

  • formatting of the text – bold , h1 etc. – GOOD
  • tables with data and other grid-like structures – GOOD
  • distance from the top and center. The most important ones are near the horizontal center of the page and also above the fold.
  • content / links that are at the absolute header/footer of the page – BAD

Microsoft research paper talks more about the fact that Pagerank model is extended where the atomic entity is not the page but page-block. One page can have multiple blocks with each having different semantics and importance.

This information can have serious impact on how the link juice is flowing from the pages and especially the part from Microsoft paper affects that. Most of the bought links are not placed in the “Most Significant Element” of the page – which is the main content bit. The bought links are placed in side bars, footers etc. These research papers say that these links are much less important than the links which are within the content block. This then just rises the value of bought content links of PayPerPost style where they are within the context of the blog post.

Another implication of these research papers confirms that search engines are able to reconstruct the HTML Document Object Model and know which content is important regardless of the position in the source code of the page. This contradicts with many SEO Experts which have been claiming in the past that you should put the most important content first just after the BODY element.

As always, your comments are welcome.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 7:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Agreed that it's important to consider on-page factors when working with links. Interesting point about data tables as well ... tables and infographics deserve a lot of focus right now.
  • I guess there's always a balance to be found in our SEO efforts. For myself I try to take account of as many factors as possible, but there are two things which affect this .... the law of diminishing returns, and the limited amount of time available for each client. So if it's possible to do a step, I do it, if not, I do the next best.

    Fantastic SEO tool, btw.
  • This is logic you can assume Google is using as well, but should also be sure that it would only be a part of a greater whole. It then that value would get tweaked routinely. Content is still king - not location, but well worth putting in the back of your head as an extra step. In the end, the user experience is what you want to optimize for after your core SEO work. If that means a link in the header, so be it. The extra step of SEO doesn't trump the user experience.
  • If you ever want to read a reader's feedback :) , I rate this article for 4/5. Decent info, but I just have to go to that damn google to find the missed bits. Thanks, anyway!
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  • Like everything else in SEO the more we try to manipulate by "perfecting" what we say and where we say it the easier it is for the engines to filter out our efforts.

    I don't watch for the position of the link but I do make sure that the page is on-topic on not just filled with other links. Also, if you distribute a press release or article you pick up a couple of good links but the vast majority of the sites that pick the article up will get filtered out.

    I agree with the article. It makes researching and writing blog posts more important than ever.

    Really a nice tool by the way, thanks.
  • Hmm, that is very interesting. I read another article the other day about the "re-emergence" of reciprocal link importance and this would tie with this conclusion, as they do tend to be in the main content area of a page.
  • This is fairly contradictory stuff from the general norm that you're taught when you start out in SEO. It seems to make sense with what I am reading around the web right now. Can I just say, I can't believe I only just found this tool. You're providing a fantastic service!! Thanks very much!

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