Does the location of a citation on a page have any relivance?

[adriandg]

We have been working on local SEO quite a lot for our small business, trying to understand why we are consistantly outranked by our competators.  I understand there are many factors at play here.

I realize that DA & PA, Places page optimization, and on page optimization also play a role, but for the purpose of this question i would like to focus on just one factor: citations.

From your experiance with local SEO do you find that a citation that is located closer to the top of the page holds more weight than a citation buried further down a page?

Here is an example:
http://www.yellowpages.ca/search/si/1/Storage-Self+Service/Toronto+ON/

in this case the people paying for the priority positions on that page are right at the top of the page, rather than buried 5 pages into the results.  in fact they are right at the top of each page of the results, so over and over again they are above the free listings.

I have heard that google considers the value of a link based on its position on the page.  So would it be safe to assume that google also considers the value of a citation based on its position on the page?

Thank you for your time,
Storwell

[blackballonline]

Not only are they above the free listings but they are on every page at the top. Thus citing your example of 5 pages they would have 5 citations; Where a free listing would only appear on one.

In addition, Google has a crawl budget - how long they spend on a site and page. If these limits are reached there is a possibility that the lower listings don't get crawled or acknowledged especially if they are buried deep into the navigation levels of a site.

[adriandg]

Doesn't this completely contradict Google's motivations?

It seems that if this was the case, then google could easily be gamed by purchasing position on all these local directories.  Wouldn't this be the opposite of what google wants?

In the case of links, google does their very best to ignore paid links.

Why would they turn around and give benefit to paid citations?

[RyanKent]

In short, most links on a page have equal value. Google does reserve the right to weigh links, but overall I have not seen any indication that links at the top of a page are weighed higher then a link at the bottom of a page.

A recently noted exception would be links in footers. Matt Cutts talks about footer links and you can also see how potentially links in the main content area can be worth more then links on sidebars in the future.

[adriandg]

that is not exactly what i got from reading this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

[RyanKent]

I have been enjoying your comments more and more. It is very clear you are reading great articles and expanding your knowledge every day.

I had not read the article you shared before now. I enjoyed it very much.

Matt Cutt's video is from Aug 2009. He shared that originally links were treated equally but Google's link analysis was growing and becoming more sophisticated. The article you referenced was written Mar 27, 2010.

This type of article is exactly why I am a member here at SEOmoz. That article represents the thorough work and analysis of SEO experts on the valuation of links. It's a great article. I am not 100% confident in their findings, but they are very logical and I will accept them and incorporate them in my future efforts.

So it appears you answered your own question, and thank you for taking the time to share the results.