First link priority

The rule of ‘first link priority,’ its importance, and whether it even exists is a hotly-discussed subject amongst web developers and those in the SEO field, with some calling it a theory, and others taking it very seriously indeed.

There isn't an official definition of first link priority however, given that Google hasn't seemed to officially confirm nor deny the existence of it. The general understanding of it is that Google reads a web page from top to bottom, and reads all of the links on the page - their destination, as well as their anchor text, among many other things. Working its way down a page, if Google reads a link's destination that matches an earlier links's destination, this second link is ignored, and most importantly, its anchor text is ignored.

This makes sense, as it prevents people from stuffing a page full of links to the same place, in order to try and trick Google into thinking that where ever these links lead is important, when they likely are not, and it is simply an attempt at keyword stuffing, where keywords are added to a page in an effort to trick the search engines into giving pages a higher ranking than they're worth. The additional content is not meant for the website's visitors, and will generally not even be visible to them.

A problem that we have experienced with this rule lies in the linking of a page's logo. It is convention among web developers to link the site's logo to the home page, which is usually placed in the header of each page. By linking the logo to the home page, there can be no further links to the home page on any of the site's pages, as they will be ignored by Google. This is important when you consider that the the best type of link for SEO is a text link, with the anchor text consisting of important keywords. In using the only link allowed to the home page to link the logo, the page misses out on a lot of potential for Google to pick up some important keywords relating to the home page.

To overcome this problem, we looked to Javascript to replace the functionality of the link. That way, we can remove the HTML link completely, and use Javascript in its place. With the link removed, Google will no longer read it, and a keyword-rich link can be placed further down the page that links to the home page, just as we wanted. The code to achieve this is quite simple, and involves adding:

onClick="window.location='http://www.example.co.uk/'"

to the image tag, just as you would an alt or an src attribute. This will redirect the page to the given url upon clicking the image – exactly what a user would expect to happen, only without the SEO complications!

The solutions to this exact problem that we have seen have usually included adding anchor text to the link surrounding the image, and then using CSS to hide the text, most often by using text-indent to position the text out of the viewable area of the page. While this works, it's not good practise, and Google will punish websites for trying to include keywords on pages that aren't viewable to the site's visitors. It's keyword stuffing, and in general, anyone who is trying to include invisible keywords on a page is trying to cheat the system.

If you have done any research into the rule of first link priority, you may have read that by attaching an alt tag to the logo, and entering the keywords there, it achieves the same result as including the keywords as anchor text. This, while better than nothing, is not as good, as Google does not give the same amount of important to alt text as it does to actual anchor text, so it is not an effective substitute.

As already discussed, the rule affects the linking of a page's logo, but not just that - all links are affected. The best example I can give is of a navigational menu. Consider a classic website menu; the first button may be 'home,' the second may be 'about us,' and let's say the third is 'products.' The idea behind these links is not SEO optimisation, but ease of comprehension and usability. Therefore, the anchor text is simple, and devoid of the kind of keywords that you may have wanted to include if it were not a main navigational link. Because Google will read these links first, the one, prioritised link that you're permitted to each of the major pages on your website has already been used by the navigation bar. Adding links further down any of the pages that point to the pages in the navigation bar, despite how rich they are with keywords, and despite how much Google would love them, are ignored by it.

This raises an important question: why haven't search engines created a tag that tells them to ignore the link completely? The nofollow tag is not an option, and tests suggest that it has no effect whatsoever when used in this way to alter Google's prioritising of links. You might think that you could use different anchor text for the links, as Google takes into account anchor text as well as the link's destination when deciding whether links are duplicates. This practice, of creating multiple links with the same destination and then filling each one with different keywords, however, borders on keyword stuffing, a practise that will reduce the page's SEO score, exactly the opposite to what you're trying to achieve.

There are ways around the rule of first link priority, but many can be considered a way to cheat the system and to trick Google, which is never advisable. Seemingly, the best way to deal with first link priority is simply to accept it, and to structure your pages with it in mind. For example, rather than linking every single page in the main navigation, include only the main pages, such as portal pages. Link to the more specific pages further down on these main pages, be this in the page's main content, or in a dedicated section for related links or links of interest. With this method, you can cram these links full of keywords, leaving only the main pages to use the more simplistic anchor text, although these are the pages that your users will be finding easily enough anyway once they hit the home page.