Weight of a Link

[John Scott]

One link is at the very bottom of a page. Another link is at the very top of the page. For PR purposes, they are ranked the same. But how about for weight_in_the_SERPs purposes? I'm thinking the bottom link would be less effective. (This is coming from a guy with over a hundred thousand footer links on dozens of sites.)

[Johan007]

If true then you type a layer at the top of your HTML but position it to the view on the footer.

If you have a dynamic site a footer link use is VERY powerful

[Grumpus]

It may be also that the footer links are duplicated across most or all of the pages on a site. This shows a "relationship" between the sites and not necessarily a "vote" for the site.

I've also been of the mind, lately, that "in context" links bear more weight than listed/placed ones because it tends to be more topicallly focused.

EXAMPLES:

Contextual Links:
I found this article about links that is very informative. The links you develop can improve your PageRank greatly. You can discuss linking strategies in our forum.

Listed/Placed Links:

Linking Strategies
Improve PageRank
Linking Stragegy Forum


The natural language in the first example puts "context" into what you might find. The list has good keywords in there, but how do they related to each other and to the page they are on?

G.

[added]I'm not saying that where it comes (top or bottom) doesn't come into play. I'm just suggesting that there may be more to it. [/added]

[John Scott]

I've also been of the mind, lately, that "in context" links bear more weight than listed/placed ones because it tends to be more topicallly focused.

I've been thinking the same thing. We discussed that somewhere briefly with Phil Craven. ... I'll try to find it.

I was just placing block-text links in another browser while reading this. I also mix up the anchor text while keeping the primary keywords in there. Like with IMR, sometimes I'll use "Internet Marketing Strategies" and then "Internet Marketing Articles" and then "Marketing Research Resource", etc.

Don't know if it does any good, but I'm thinking it might give each link a unique value.

[Grumpus]

Seems to me that the vamped up density filters may be tripped less frequently using this technigue. The density filters now seem to not only include the ratio of keywords to all words on the page, but the ratio of keywords in titles vs. all words in titles, keywords in anchor text vs. all words in anchor text, and keywords in formatted text (H1, EM, B, STRONG, etc) vs. all words in formatted text.

If these ratios are too high, (ie. the search term is more than X% of all the words found in link text, and so on) that it trips some sort of filter. So, by chaning up your words, you're less likely to trip one of these filters.

If all your inbound links said "Internet Marketing Strategies" you'd likely be fine for the term "Internet Marketing" but not for the term "Internet Marketing Strategies". In the former, the ratio is 66.6%, in the latter, it's 100%. I don't know where the cutoff is, but it appears to be much lower for "formatted" text than the others.

(And, there does now seem to be a reason to use keywords in your URLs if you are putting all the same keywords in your inbound link text - if it's in the URL, then the filter seems to kick in less frequently - presumably because it's in the URL so it's is NECESSARY to have the words in there? I dunno...)

G.

[I, Brian]

One simple way to mix up your anchor text is using a set of simple php includes statements. If you click on my "Religions of the world" signature link, you'll see that I've set the anchor text links from there to my new SEO site in a very non-linear manner.

As for the issue of link weight in general - this is one area where I see too much information being repeated, and not actually being tested out. I'm setting up a series of public SEO experiments, and this is one of my key areas of investigation.