How Important Is the Location of Links in a Blog Post?

You know a blog post is good when you would still want to read it from beginning to end even if it were printed out in hard copy, such that you could not follow the links. (You know you are a geriatric millennial if, when you were in college, your dad used to print out interesting articles his friends forwarded to him by email and send them to you by postal mail, when he could have just as easily forwarded them to your university email address.) Blog posts are more than just a way to link your website to other sites, and the body text is more than just a prelude to the call-to-action paragraph at the end, where the reader can follow a link to contact you.

Despite this, everyone who has written a blog post for a business website knows that links are important; even a perfunctory search for how to write blog posts will indicate that you should link to other pages on your site as well as to credible sources for the information you are presenting. How important is it where the links are in relation to the rest of the text in the post? There are lots of rumors about this, but no authoritative answers, and the best way to cope with this ambiguity is to entrust the composition of your legal blog content to professional content writers who will deliver posts that perform well no matter where they place the links.

Google: If There Is an Ideal Location for Links, We’re Not Telling Where It Is

Some content marketing guides will tell you that Google’s bots will pay more attention to the links from your site if they are in the first paragraph, while others say that including a link in the last paragraph is more beneficial to your SEO rankings. This debate has as much to do with curiosity about the psychology of search engine bots as it does with the practicalities of optimizing a web page. Asking whether bots read a web page from top to bottom or from bottom to top is somewhat like asking whether dogs dream in black and white or in color.

When asked about this matter during a Twitter discussion, John Mueller of Google was perfectly evasive. He said that the anchor text connected to the link matters more than the location, but he did not disclose which link locations, if any, Google’s bots prefer. Then Gianluca Fiorelli mentioned that Google owned a patent called Reasonable Surfer that pays attention to link locations. Mueller’s noncommittal response was full of the kinds of punctuation-based emojis that geriatric millennials used to use on AOL Instant Messenger while procrastinating studying for their college finals.

You’ve Come to the Right Place for Law Firm Blog Posts

You can count on the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to produce custom-written blog content that boosts the SEO rankings of your law firm’s website, so you can have more free time to spend pondering life’s unanswerable questions.