Internal Linking: Site-wide VS Content Links

[Dan-Petrovic]

I just watched this video in which Matt Cutts talks about the ancient 100 links per page limit.

I often encounter websites which have massive navigation (elaborate main menu, side bar, footer, superfooter...etc) in addition to content area based links.

My question is do you think Google passes votes (PageRank and anchor text) differently from template links such as navigation to the ones in the content area, if so have you done any testing to confirm?

[oneticsoft]

Many of this massive navigation are made in flash, javascript, and google can't see them as links, then it conts them as 1 link or as refference to javascript file and nothing else, that's how its done to have massive links but not seen by google or you can set nofollow to non preffered links then google will analyze different your page. And the answer is No, Links are Links everywhere only difference is the tag that link contains, and you can test this with tools like spider view try one on 2 pages and you'll se that there is no difference

Best,

Ion

[Dan-Petrovic]

Thanks for your input!

It seems like your vote goes towards all links being treated equally regardless of their location/function. Interesting... I have suspicion that there is or should be difference. Why?

Consider this, Google notices 150 sitewide links that always appear. Wouldn't it make sense for Google to treat page-specific links differently to sitewide ones as that would in fact improve their ranking system (e.g. 150 standard links not diluting the importance of a page specific link given through content).

Thoughts?

[Theo-NL]

Rand has written a blog about this a while ago, how not all links on webpages are created equal, you might find it interesting:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

[oneticsoft]

it is a thought that there is an importance if the links apear at the begining of body or at end and if they are in specific tags. How do you specify to crawler that a speciffic link is from a navbar and that link has an bigger value than other content links?

[Dan-Petrovic]

He also said: "We invite and strongly encourage readers to test these themselves."

This is what I am after, personal opinion from people who have either tested or experienced the effect first hand.