Link Location Still Making That Much Difference?

[SteveOllington]

I got to thinking earlier... I know obviously footer links are always going to be the bottom of the barrel but does the rest of block level analysis still mean as much... I mean, everybody went nuts with getting in-content links only so there's a billion and one badly written spammy blogs with useless content on just for the sake of getting in-content links instead of blogroll/sidebar links. I just wonder if maybe due to that, things might have levelled out a bit for link location and we hadn't noticed... or at least there's not been much discussion over it lately.

Thoughts anyone?

[JamesNorquay]

I think the thing is most of the sites which spam links within content google will just look at the number of links on the specific page.

If you have a blog with 30 low quality articles and each post has like 5 links within the content it is not going to pass much value.

I mean I still see websites with 100's of root domain links in the footer of their clients and they are still doing well, the thing is because they have a low number of out going links.

[EGOL]

When crap links to crap the position of the link does not matter.

When quality links to quality the position of the link does not matter.

That is an oversimplification but think of it like this.... when a quality website gives a meritorious link to another website, they usually don't put it in their footer or in their header or in their side navigation.  Instead they link to it within a blog post or within an article or within a list of great resources.  All of these are in the content window of the site.

[AlanMosley]

Well put. even if placement did not matter, I believe contextual links would have an advantage being surounded by content showing relevance, rather than being plonked somewhere

[SteveOllington]

Yeah that does clear things up in my head... do you think it's always the case though. I mean with blogs yeah I reckon it is massively, but on normal informational sites you tend to see a lot of links to "useful information" types stuff in sidebars... i.e. A website about planning permission for houses that would link to the local council for regulations, etc...

I'm just wondering if the slurry of poor content blogs with contextual links that ensued the discussions on block level a few years back has resulted in the whole idea being scaled back.

Again I would rule out the footer altogether as it will I'm sure always be considered a place where no decent link would be put. But to me, a sidebar link could be of more importance to the user than one within the content... in a sense like it's more something a site is offering users to see, standing out from the content if that makes sense.

Kind of like what you said with the list of great resources, would you usually find that in the content window? I often see them in the sidebar.

Just to clarify though, I think "When crap links to crap the position of the link does not matter." is totally right but would you say "When quality links to quality the position of the link does not matter." was absolutely the case, or do you think it does matter a bit, just not loads?