Every blog has links al over the page, We have links in the content, we have links on the sidebar, we have navigation links, footer links…all that. So does Google see all these links the same way with equal weightage or differently ? That’s the question.
Well, technically its easy for us to get it wrong. Normally webmasters and SEOs see links based on PageRank and traffic on a site. Almost every link exchange request I get request me text links on the sidebar or above the fold, with the typical “contextual link with a few lines of text”.
I’d like to clarify that “a few lines of text” is not actually being contextual. You bought single keyword text links – Google found it – screwed your page rank. And now, you’re repeating it. Not good.
In my humble opinion, “Contextual links” are the ones that are present in the textual content, in the real copy or the article. Both you and me can easily find out what’s contextual and what not. And Google bots are equally intelligent.
So just adding a few lines of text before and after your “bought link” doesn’t make it contextual.
Coming back to the topic, does all the links placed at different places on the same page, have equal importance ? As you might have already figured out, No.
Links at the footer, or the header, are probably navigational links or copyright/TOS links, as the majority of websites uses it that way. And Google bots know this.
They’d like to give more importance to links that appear in the content/article. So footer links / sidebar links are likely to get less importance by Google whereas in-the-content links would be considered more important.
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Hi,
From what you said, I infer that the navigation links, which are present on every page of a website have little weightage for bots. But they also contribute towards the pagerank. Not every website uses contextual links. Even if we start using contextual links, only one link will be counted per page as proved by some experiments.
Thanks
Atul
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If all the links in the page gets least importance than the ones in the content,do all those gets the same importance. As you said mostly the footer links are copyright and TOS links,does the other links get more importance than this. If all gets same importance, then why do people go for featured and paid links.?
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