[case study] - does backlink position within content affect its impact on ranking?

Just a short and sweet case study in response to this post from @HenryObi

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/what-do-you-think-about-backlinks-position.1417813/
Question: Does the position of a backlink within the content of a page affact its power and effect in terms of SEO?

My experiment

Page A contains a backlink to page B.
The page containing the link is the second most popular page on the website and is responsible for 17.1% of the sites traffic.



The link is currently sitting in the second half of the third paragraph, which you have to scroll down to see, on desktop view, thanks to some other content including featured image and advertising block appearing before it.



I have the exact same phrase on this page, appearing in the first two lines of text within the content.

page B is currently ranking for several keywords
Page B is ranking in the top 10 for 7 keywords and has another two positions falling within top 100 results.
It does not currently rank in the top 100 for the exact match phrase used in the link from page A.



The changes I am making

I have moved the backlink from the third paragraph, to the first paragraph, on page A.



Lets see if this makes any difference to the positions at which page B is currently enjoying on Google. I am not expecting page B to turn up on the results for the exact match keywords but it will be interesting to see if anything changes with regard to its current exposure in the serps.

davids355 said:

Just a short and sweet case study in response to this post from @HenryObi

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/what-do-you-think-about-backlinks-position.1417813/
Question: Does the position of a backlink within the content of a page affact its power and effect in terms of SEO?

My experiment

Page A contains a backlink to page B.
The page containing the link is the second most popular page on the website and is responsible for 17.1% of the sites traffic.

The link is currently sitting in the second half of the third paragraph, which you have to scroll down to see, on desktop view, thanks to some other content including featured image and advertising block appearing before it.

I have the exact same phrase on this page, appearing in the first two lines of text within the content.

page B is currently ranking for several keywords
Page B is ranking in the top 10 for 7 keywords and has another two positions falling within top 100 results.
It does not currently rank in the top 100 for the exact match phrase used in the link from page A.

The changes I am making

I have moved the backlink from the third paragraph, to the first paragraph, on page A.

Lets see if this makes any difference to the positions at which page B is currently enjoying on Google. I am not expecting page B to turn up on the results for the exact match keywords but it will be interesting to see if anything changes with regard to its current exposure in the serps.

Click to expand...

Now this is awesome, at least we'd get to have a real world idea or experience.

I dont think this will make any difference

Seems all good, but I've got spam blogs with like 10,000 links in each page, so I'm dead sure backlinks position doesn't matter

Pretty neat, this is the best possible way to test whether the theories thrown out in the SEO communities actually work.

Great one (as always) @davids355

Following this Dave.

Very interesting stuff.

hats off for your efforts david
Following it.

Interesting my gut says there’s no difference but then I’m no seo guru, so let’s see what you find cause it’ll be replicated by almost all

Usually people click onto 3 or 2nd paragraph !

great experimentation.

Hawkeye Digital said:

Usually people click onto 3 or 2nd paragraph !

Click to expand...

We're primarily focused on the SEO effect/impact. Nothing more than that. It's well known that people are more likely to click on or interact with the first few links.

So all we care is Google's response alone.

I believe this will have little or no impact, since the link was already contextual. Well, I’d be waiting to see the result of your case study.

HenryObi said:

We're primarily focused on the SEO effect/impact. Nothing more than that. It's well known that people are more likely to click on or interact with the first few links.

So all we care is Google's response alone.

Click to expand...

Yeah. But, the question is how does Google view the power of a link? Isn't it all (or substantially) about how likely a link is to be clicked on?

I think a good rule to have in the back of your mind is always, what would you do if search engines didn't exist? What would the value of a link be then? It would be purely about the amount and quality of the traffic it brings. So a link that is more likely to be clicked is worth more than one buried at the bottom of the page. It shouldn't surprise us if search engines value links in the exact same way.

agent-x said:

Yeah. But, the question is how does Google view the power of a link? Isn't it all (or substantially) about how likely a link is to be clicked on?

Click to expand...

It would make no sense if Google only passes link juice to links that are at the top just because they're at the top. Links are for reference purposes or you could even say recommendation.

The value of a reference(or recommendation) should not be determined by its position on the page.

Afterall, the quality of a webpage does not depreciate the further you scroll down. Assuming it's a well written article, it should be valuable from top to bottom.


Google is not an affiliate marketer or a business trying to promote their product, so the position of a link inside an article shouldn't matter much to them, what matters is that wherever you are sending your visitors to should actually be relevant to the current page.

HenryObi said:

It would make no sense if Google only passes link juice to links that are at the top just because they're at the top. Links are for reference purposes or you could even say recommendation.

The value of a reference(or recommendation) should not be determined by its position on the page.

Afterall, the quality of a webpage does not depreciate the further you scroll down. Assuming it's a well written article, it should be valuable from top to bottom.


Google is not an affiliate marketer or a business trying to promote their product, so the position of a link inside an article shouldn't matter much to them, what matters is that wherever you are sending your visitors to should actually be relevant to the current page.

Click to expand...

Yes but what I am saying is, forget search engines for a moment. If we don't do that we are admitting that search engines have distorted the fabric of the web, since the web is based on "hyper text markup language", and hyper text refers to text with links in it. That is the whole basis of web pages, the ability to link to each other. What other purpose is there of a link if it doesn't send traffic to the page being linked to? A link that never gets clicked on is worthless in the absense of search engines. So for search engines not to distort the whole point of hyper text, the same must apply with them as without them.

Imagine a 10,000 word long article with a link at the bottom. How many visitors ever read that far down? If no-one ever even sees the link it might as well not be there aside from the purposes of SEO and that is what Google is at war with - the placing of links purely for SEO. Of course it's worth observing that the number of clicks from such a link as I have just described would also depend on how many visitors the page gets, and of course that the value of the traffic from the link also depends on the relevancy of the page as you said.

A testing community on BHW would be neat

HenryObi said:

It would make no sense if Google only passes link juice to links that are at the top just because they're at the top. Links are for reference purposes or you could even say recommendation.

The value of a reference(or recommendation) should not be determined by its position on the page.

Afterall, the quality of a webpage does not depreciate the further you scroll down. Assuming it's a well written article, it should be valuable from top to bottom.


Google is not an affiliate marketer or a business trying to promote their product, so the position of a link inside an article shouldn't matter much to them, what matters is that wherever you are sending your visitors to should actually be relevant to the current page.

Click to expand...

agent-x said:

Yes but what I am saying is, forget search engines for a moment. If we don't do that we are admitting that search engines have distorted the fabric of the web, since the web is based on "hyper text markup language", and hyper text refers to text with links in it. That is the whole basis of web pages, the ability to link to each other. What other purpose is there of a link if it doesn't send traffic to the page being linked to? A link that never gets clicked on is worthless in the absense of search engines. So for search engines not to distort the whole point of hyper text, the same must apply with them as without them.

Imagine a 10,000 word long article with a link at the bottom. How many visitors ever read that far down? If no-one ever even sees the link it might as well not be there aside from the purposes of SEO and that is what Google is at war with - the placing of links purely for SEO. Of course it's worth observing that the number of clicks from such a link as I have just described would also depend on how many visitors the page gets, and of course that the value of the traffic from the link also depends on the relevancy of the page as you said.

Click to expand...

Both of these points make sense and honestly, I don't know the answer nor do I know my standpoint. I do beleive that Google are looking for traffic flows as a strong factor to back up their algorithms. For example if a site has thousands of backlinks, but never gets any traffic or nobody ever exists from the link sources to that site, its probably going to be of less value in Googles eyes?

Equally if you are trying to determine how relevant an external link is to a topic, you are looking at the surounding text of course, and how closely the content on both sites match eachother? You are looking at the anchor perhaps to determine if the link is topically relevant or just included as an aside? And it sort of makes sense as well that you look at how important the link was to the article - which I think might include whether the writer meant it to be clicked and also when they included it. For example, was it in brackets, indicating that its some sort of required reference or further reading, was it at the end of the article indicating that it was a source of general information, or if it was right at the top, is it very pivotal to the content?

Remember its not just about how important the link is but also from Googles point of view, its like - there are 20 external links in an article, how exactly do they all relate to the topic at hand - are they extremely important references about the core topic or are they included because they substantiate a point.

Anyway, who knows but at least with this test we might see if it makes any difference.

I submited a fresh sitemap as well and I will check back in a week or so, to see if the link has moved in Googles cache of the page. I will probably then check over 3-4 weeks because these things often don't change quickly. Lets see what happens (if anything).

This is what I always want to see and could save us a lot of time when doing linking. Following!
Thank you for bringing a very interesting topic to us!

First update - The repositioned anchor got indexed quite quickly by Google - as confirmed by checking with query "page title" site:domain.com, then looking at googles cached version of the page. I think this happened 1-2 days after I made the changes, I wasn't going to worry about updating you guys on that.

However, today I checked the serps, according to ahrefs, for the page that is being linked to (Page B) and it has a couple of new keywords along with a couple of small improvements -



Just to clarify, changes so far are as follows -

New keywords (Note these are all partial match of the anchor text used on page A):
New keyword #1 - from nowhere to #5
New keyword #2 - from nowhere to #38
New keyword #3 - from nowhere to #46

Improved keywords (Again this one is also partial match of anchor used on page A):
Improved keyword #1 - from #51 to #47 (+4)

Lost keywords (May be coincidence, but this is less similar keyword to the anchor used):
Lost keyword #1 - from 8 tonowhere

The above could be coincidence, fluctuations in the serps or just new keywords that ahrefs happens to have picked up. However, it does seem like some changes have come about as a result of moving the anchor text placement on page A. Also worth noting that I have not touched this site at all for quite some time, so it won't be any factors from my side affecting the change - other than the anchor change.

I will still be waiting and re-checking in the next days/weeks to see if there are any further changes in the serps for page B. But it looks interesting so far.

Thoughts?

davids355 said:

Thoughts?

Click to expand...

I never really was expecting any changes but this right now is giving me second thought. Yhe changes also seem quick.

Let's see how things go as time progresses, but it seems there'd be more positive changes.