Links Higher Up in HTML Code Cast More Powerful Votes?

First of all, I want everyone to know that this is not a statement, that little thing on the end of the title (?) is called a question mark, and it denotes a question god dammit! Too often when I pose ideas on this blog, I get picked apart by people who take it as the SEO bible. Everything on this blog is just my only thoughts and ramblings, it shouldn’t be taken as the law. Anyway, with that out of the way…

I ran across an interesting post on SEOMoz today. About not all links being equal in Google’s eyes. Nothing new with that statement, but they did post some new ideas that I don’t believe I have ever heard talked about before. The first point that really caught my eye was this one :  “Links Higher Up in HTML Code Cast More Powerful Votes?“. Now basically what they are saying, is that the higher up a link is placed in the HTML of a page, the more weight it will give.

They have some pretty snazzy diagrams that I will chuck up here aswell :

And the second one :

Now the first thing is. That you don’t want to take this as the law. You shouldn’t start only taking link exchanges from people who put your link high in the HTML. Everything is relative. They are only saying, that if there is two external links on the SAME page. That the one at the top will be more valuable. My first reaction to this was “I guess….” followed by a massive pause. It seems to fit most SEO ideologies right. And when link directories were popular back in the day, when you paid for a “Sponsored Listing” and moved to the top of the page, it would have been nice to get an added SEO benefit.

This also sticks to the fact that when someone opens a new webpage. That their eye starts at the top left corner and works down from there. Google wants to treats links just like a visitor. A visitor would never go to a footer link, so why should Google give it the same amount of weight as a link in the main content.

But given that I am a web developer myself and spend most of my days manipulating code, it really started sticking in me.  The thing is, that where you write the code on a page, or really in any programming language, isn’t always where it ends up on the page. Just because I write some HTML code at the top of a document, using things like CSS Styles, and maybe even javascript, it may not always be where it ends up. The most common thing is that you can use the style of “position:fixed”, and you can position a piece of HTML literally anywhere on your screen. Heck it is what I used in my CPA Gateway Code. The gateway code is actually at the top of the page, but gets moved around by styling. Now maybe not the greatest of examples, because the gateway isn’t really designed with SEO in mind. But the fact is, where you write code, is not where it ends up.

Another thing that is fairly popular nowadays, is to use the CSS style of “float:right” to make a two column layout.  Now you don’t have to do it this way, but the majority of people who use float:right, Write the right hand column ABOVE the left hand column. And then when the CSS of float:right is applied, it sort of fulls down the right hand side and into place. Bit confusing, hopefully you follow. Using this technique, you can see that the the html that is supposedly above the left hand column is now side by side. In this case. we should definitely be giving more weight to links in the left hand panel, 1. Because it is closer to the top left hand corner, 2. Because it is the main content, not a sidebar. But taking SEOMoz theory, the right hand panel will get higher link juice because it is higher in the HTML code. Doesn’t seem right.

SEOMoz could very well be right on this one. But I think they have over simplified it, and there is alot more at play than simply where the link is in the HTML page. I would even suggest that Google is evaluating CSS properties to work out what the page actually looks like as the final result. But with everything in the SEO world, nothing is certain.