Is Your Site Structured To Take Advantage Of First Link Priority?

There is some debate amongst the professional SEO community as to whether or not “first link priority” is or is not observed by Google.  For those of you that are unfamiliar to “first link priority”, it relates to observations made by several SEOs over the past year and a half that claim Google places a higher level of “importance” on the very first link it crawls on a page. (You may notice the anchor text of the first link on this blog is ‘home’…. not exactly what I should be targeting with this blog… but oh well, this is just for fun)

The phenomenon of first link priority is important to the internal linking structure of your site because the anchor text and link URL you choose to put in this location allegedly get the majority of love from the Big G.  If I were to tweak one thing on this blog to ensure that I was adhering to all SEO best practices, it would be to change the anchor text in the first navigational tab at the top of the page from ‘Home’ to something like ‘SEO Blog’… of course, since my logo is also clickable I would need to utilize some fancy CSS work to ensure that the ‘SEO Blog’ link is appearing above all other links in my blog’s code.

I have not personally been able to determine on my own whether or not “First Link Priority” is reality or simply “guru talk”… though to be safe I tend to to observe it and structure pages accordingly during the site development phase for clients.  This can be done via CSS or in tables if using HTML.