1st Link Priority

The search engines are noticing a trend from blog comments and sponsored links affecting search engine results that are often placed on the bottom of pages. With that said, it is believed that First Link Priority is becoming a major emphasis for the search engines.

What is First Link Priority, How Does It Work?

This is how it works, the first links that are displayed on a page receive the large majority of link value from a page. Therefore, the value lies in ensuring you cater your link value distribution around this methodology. To be safe, I would recommend placing navigation on the right hand of your website that is not as important to your SEO strategy. For example, pages that aren’t going to really boost your rankings should go on the right hand table of your website (if you have one), because those will be displayed last. Another option is to design tables so that the text version of Google’s cache sees the non-important navigation at the bottom of the page.

You may ask why this would matt? My belief is that Google is placing much more relevance on internal linking within content – and this is obtaining a lot more favor than navigation links – therefore you need to embrace this concept.

I believe that navigation may be excluded by First Link Priority because the search engines can notice link trends throughout all pages, however chances are there is some relevance to First Link Priority needing to be considered when creating navigation.  Another factor to consider is this, on top of first link priority, pages on websites that have a large number of outbound links to other websites receive diluted outbound link value for that page.

For example, if you obtain a link on a page with 30 other outbound links to other websites, chances are that you would obtain 3.333% of that pages external link value. Whereas, if you are the only outbound link on this page – you receive 100% of the external link value.  This helps Google to reduce reciprocal & 3 way link campaign value. I also believe that the first links are valued higher, and lower links are valued less – because this would help to kill the value in blog comments.

With all that said, I believe that one of the best ways to build links from other websites is by Guest Blog Posts, Social Media, Guest Articles on popular websites, Home Page Links (from other websites) & links from quality directories that dedicate an entire page specifically to your company.

Joel McLaughlin / Dataflurry /