Adjusting the Placement of Links on a Page Doesn’t Affect SEO

John Mueller of Google fame has taken to twitter to put to bed a long standing SEO debate; Mr. Mueller was responding to a question regarding the potential value of simply adjusting the placement of a link within the same page.

He confirmed that it makes no difference whatsoever.

“I wouldn’t assume that you’d get a boost out of just moving links from one part of the page to another part,” is how he put it.

Specifically, Mr. Mueller was quizzed as to whether or not including links early on in the content of a page made any difference to the significance of value of the link in question.

“I am not saying about to place external links but internal links. My asking is about internal link location for passing link equity. Does google give more weight for the links that are at the first paragraph within an article than at the last?” was the question asked.

To which, he provided the following response:

“Usually the usability recommendations map well to SEO too :-). I wouldn’t assume that you’d get a boost out of just moving links from one part of the page to another part though.”

This does not necessarily mean that adjusting the positioning of links isn’t sometimes a good idea for improved usability, but in terms of SEO it seems highly improbable that moving links to the beginning of a piece of text will see them gain traction than if they were located right at the end.

Mr. Mueller was also quizzed on how (if at all) having multiple links to the same URL on the same page affects its SEO score or performance.

“I mean: same url in one page by multiple times at multi location of that page,” was the question asked, to which Mueller offered the following response:

“Ah, got it, thanks! Having multiple links to the same URL within a single page doesn’t cause any problems. Sometimes it makes sense to do that for usability reasons. It doesn’t change crawling, so it wouldn’t affect the crawl budget.”

It would appear that linking to the same page several times within one single page is neither detrimental not beneficial. It is therefore a case of focusing more on the user experience and the usefulness of the links, rather than embedding them purely with SEO intent in mind.