Interesting @BruceClay Tweets from First Day of PubCon

Being unable to attend Pubcon this year, I am making do with #pubcon hashtags on Twitter – at least until the blogs come out.

There are certain live blogging updates that I read as well. It helps me stay up-to-date with info coming out of these great sessions, but nothing beats actually being there. Oh well, there’s always next year…

One of the first trends to pop out for me when checking the Pubcon hash tag were a few tweets from @BrentDPayne and others about some statements made by Bruce Clay. I’ve been hearing these theories off and on for the last year (I think I first heard the “first link wins” theory from StomperNet), but haven’t quite come to a 100% positive conclusion on any of them either through experience or testing. I do have my own opinions based on experience, but none based on testing in a controlled environment. Before the SEO community takes a logical assumption and turns it into unsubstantiated “common knowledge” we should do what we can to test and substantiate the claims. Feel free to post links in the comments section below if you have any white papers or reliable information about these topics. Also, feel free to voice your opinion in the comments area as well.

Via @bruceclay – The first occurrence of link text to a specific link on a page becomes the link text Google uses for all links on that page. Put another way, if u link to URL A in multiple spots on a page, the anchor text on 1st link to URL A is the anchor text used for all.
Thoughts: It is a good idea for you to use good anchor text in your header navigation and home page header logo-link anyway. If it’s an image link, use good alt-text. If it is a text link like “home” use a good title attribute. But whatever you do, don’t try to get fancy by nofollowing the header links thinking you’d rather have the text from lower links count instead. You may just end up running into the problems below…

From Barry Schwartz via @bruceclay – Text links trumps the image anchor text link on a page no matter of placement.
Thoughts: Unless, it is a stop word, such as “home”. See more of that below…

Via @bruceclay – If u link to URL A in multiple spots on a page, & nofollow any link to URL A, all links to URL A are nofollowed.
Thoughts: I never got into nofollow pagerank sculpting like this. The only pages I ever nofollowed were ones like “TOS” and “Privacy”. It you want to get fancy and choose which link on a page “counts” you could obfuscate higher links using tricks like embedding the link in a .js file, stored in a folder that is disallowed in the robots.txt and then referencing that javascript instead of actually using an href tag on the page. But I would be surprised if using javascript that is then disallowed wouldn’t invite a human review of your website. It is much simpler to just use the guidelines set forth above.

Via @bruceclay – There are stop words that don’t pass anchor text. Examples include “next,” “back,” “home”. Then next anchor text to link used.
Thoughts: So if your header navigation says “Home” but then you link to your home page in the body text, sidebar or footer with better anchor text – the first statement above is no longer true? Again, wouldn’t it be easier to use good anchor/alt/title text in the first link? Perhaps… but what if you wanted more control?

I have trouble believing that body text links don’t count if that page is also linked to in the navigation with something other than “next,” “back,” and “home”. But if this is the case, I sure would like a complete list of “stop words”. For instance, is “about” a stop word? What about “contact” and “contact us”? What about “blog”?