Experience Results from Experienced Marketers

Most Overlooked SEO Metric: Link Placement

October 5, 2008 – 5:25 pm

By Jordan Kasteler (Utah SEO Pro)

Have you ever received an email from someone requesting a link exchange touting that they have a valuable link to offer you? Ever purchased a link from a broker at a particular cost based on metrics over negotiation? How do they usually declare that link is valuable?

There’s a culmination of variables that declare a link’s worth. While it’s unfortunate that none of them have highly valuable accuracy, combined together gives a better idea of the value. Such variables are:

• Google Toolbar PageRank
• Alexa Score
• Compete Score
• Yahoo Inbound Link #
• Industry/Niche Relevancy
• Link Placement
• Hub Authority
• Follow/Nofollow
• Indexation
• Domain Age
• Page Age
• Etc

These metrics each hold different weight in measuring a page’s value it can pass on to a link.

Authority Gauge - Toolbar PageRank

Many link brokers love to look at Google Toolbar PageRank thus causing the Google PageRank adjusting of many sites involved in such practices. Google’s PageRank slaps were an attempt to throw off the paid link industry. By decreasing Toolbar PageRank on a page the link broker could no longer charge as much for that link anymore when they were basing the value of a link on it’s PageRank.

Traffic Gauge - Alexa/Compete

Some brokers moved to looking at traffic metrics instead link Alexa and Compete scores but those traffic measurements are flawed because it is based off tool bar installations and approximation.

Behavioral Gauge - Click Thru Rate (CTR)

While search engines are increasingly creating more patents to consider user performance metrics such as user behavior of link CTR and how much time is spent on that link, etc.

Link Partner Gauge - Co-Citation

SEOs evaluate the interconnectivity of link neighborhoods of webpages and sites linked together to get a good idea of authority level.

And now we get to one of the most overlooked gauges:

Link Placement Gauge - Block Level Segmentation

It’s been a very long time since Microsoft first published their Vision-based Page Segmentation (VIPS) patent in late 2003. This algorithm opened the doors to their search engine being able to analyze a Website and recognize it’s templated portions.

A search engine would want to recognize the visual layout of a page to weight different elements of content differently. Where I’m getting at is it’s opened the doors to other search engines to start thinking about block-level link analysis (PDF) to grant differently weighted value to links in sidebars, headers, footers, and content areas.

A large amount of link brokers sell links through systems where they get sellers to user their management system on their site that inserts links that people buy to pre-defined templated areas of the site. With Google increasingly defining how it’s visualizing and segmenting the content of Webpages, there is a growing amount of importance of placing links on a page in a natural manner.

With so many people selling links in their sidebar or people linking off to link farms in their footer search engines have been learning to devalue these links for quite a while now. While an SEO might be looking at all the other link metrics defined earlier in this post they may be ignoring the fact that their link may be highly devalued if not in the content area of the layout, surrounded by other related text, written in natural form.

Link brokers find it hard to automate the link buying and selling process without an easy automated method of easily seeding links in the templates of pages. It becomes much more difficult to fit links into body copy in a natural manner that does not heavily endorse advertising.

While some link brokers have manually gone into old posts and aged Webpages to insert paid links it had been speculated that Google has a filter to recognize that. (See Todd Friesen’s SMX Give it Up Tips)

Quick Summary

While a Webpage may have two related outgoing links on it, each link is not given the same value depending upon it’s placement in the page. Always, opt for:

• Naturally written anchor text
• Related surround copy
• A link in the body text of the content area of the page
• Higher in the copy area than lower to try to obtain higher CTR to appease behavioral metrics given to links from search engines including things like BrowseRank.