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

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

via Link Diagnosis de admin em 03/03/08

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.