Since it’s Friday let’s finish the week with a nice short and straightforward video post. Most people know this already but judging by the number of people still building sidebar and footer links it’s fair to assume not everybody does.
Summary – Links within content pass more trust & authority than links in the footer of a website.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Its such a pity Google need to waste their time creating videos like this – I’d much rather them answer usefull questions.
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We all know very well and its common knowledge that links in content of any site plays very important role.
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common knowledge but always good to get it straight from the horse’s mouth. although i think it’s key he says “reserve the right” – if a link on site X is contextual it doesn’t automatically mean it will carry more weight than a link from site Y’s sidebar – there’s obviously a lot more factors in play and i don’t necessarily think he’s saying contextually links will ALWAYS count for more..
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Maybe people are building side and footer bars for their users? I use them all the time, whether Google trusts those links or not is of no consequence to me! They aren’t links to my sites after all
The classic theme author footer link is an interesting one. If 1000s of people use that theme then that’s a lot of back links back to the theme author – but isn’t it right that they should rank well because their theme is a popular one?
But anyway, I don’t see how this would change the way I build sites, only that if I am requesting a back link it should go in content but often you don’t really have that kind of control (which is why Google uses back links in the first place!).
More comments from BLOGERCISEI agree with you Steven. There are many questions for Google I think are more interesting than this one, which you can find a answer to almost everywhere. Hopefully it didn’t take them to much time and effort to make this video.
I think it just makes sense, having regular occuring text and links in headers, sidebars and footers will be ignored. Having individual pages with unique text that contain links won’t be ignored..simple
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Videos can be a useful reference though. SEO is changing so quick, i know i can barely keep track of it! Unique text = good, however, is something I’ve got drilled into my brain. Thanks for the reminder though!
More comments from LuciThis is suspicious. Why is google making a video? Google just want to prevent people from buying links.
There was talk of footer links being discounted, but I do not belive this theory. If you optimise someones site and they offer you a footer link from their PR6 homepage, your going to take it. And I’m sure it will have value.
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lol – surprise surprise… this is news from 2004 …. nice tough that Google releases a video now…
More comments from cemperCan’t say I understand the hating for this vid – it’s a quick question that only needs a quick answer. And with regards to there being more useful questions that could be answered, I’d argue that there are lots of people that are new to the industry (the ones that started in the industry after 2004!!) who this will be new and useful too.
What’s useful is subjective. I think no matter what question matt cutts answers will always be greeted with a “well I knew that already” from someone. I say fair play to him for not just fielding the harder techie questions.
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Right the link in the content feed better the search engine spieder but about the quality
More comments from webandranksome time the sidebar link is better even if you look from the quality of the website and all related factors.
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