{"id":11651,"date":"2026-07-15T09:33:47","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T01:33:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/?p=11651"},"modified":"2026-07-15T09:33:47","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T01:33:47","slug":"googles-mueller-on-first-link-priority-link-obfuscation-via-sejournal-mattgsouthern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/?p=11651","title":{"rendered":"Google\u2019s Mueller On First Link Priority &amp; Link Obfuscation via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p> <div id=\"narrow-cont\"> <p>Google Search Advocate John Mueller responded to a plan to hide a homepage button from Google in hopes that a better-worded link further down the page would count instead. He suspects the person behind it is overthinking it.<\/p> <p>The r\/bigseo thread starts with a question about a homepage that links to the same services page twice. The first link is a \u2018Services\u2019 button near the top, while the second sits further down in an FAQ, worded the way the person wants Google to read it.<\/p> <p>To get the second link to \u201cwin,\u201d they plan to make the more prominent button stop being a link. It would still work when someone clicks it, but the page\u2019s code wouldn\u2019t call it a link anymore. That leaves the FAQ link as the only regular link on the page pointing to the services page.<\/p> <p><iframe class=\"sej-iframe-auto-height\" id=\"in-content-iframe\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/www.searchenginejournal.com\/wp-json\/sscats\/v2\/tk\/Middle_Post_Text\"><\/iframe><\/p> <p>They asked the thread whether it would make any visible difference.<\/p> <h2>What Mueller Said<\/h2> <p>Mueller replied in the thread:<\/p> <blockquote> <p>\u201cI suspect you\u2019re overthinking it, Google has practice dealing with lots of websites so I wouldn\u2019t expect you to see any visible change there.<\/p> <p>That said, if you wanted to experiment with this, I\u2019d suggest doing something more along the lines of using CSS \/ JS to position things on the page, regardless of where the link is placed in the HTML. That reduces the potential negative side-effects of \u201cbreaking\u201d the HTML (turning links into buttons, or similar, ugh) while still letting you vary the position in your page\u2019s HTML code.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> <p>He didn\u2019t say whether the first link wins. His answer is about the size of the effect and the cost of chasing it.<\/p> <h2>Why Anyone Would Try This<\/h2> <p>The idea behind the plan is called first link priority. It says that when one page links to another page twice, Google reads the words in the first link and ignores the second. If that were true, the button would win and the FAQ link would be wasted.<\/p> <p>Google has never clearly defined \u201cfirst link priority.\u201d SEJ\u2019s ranking factors chapter on first link priority traces the idea to a 2008 Rand Fishkin post and finds nothing to support treating it as a rule you can build on. Mueller has said before that Google hasn\u2019t defined the behavior, and that whatever anyone figures out about how Google does it today isn\u2019t necessarily how it will work tomorrow.<\/p> <p>The idea keeps circulating anyway. SEJ\u2019s Roger Montti covered a similar worry about anchor text dilution last April.<\/p> <h2>What Google Sees<\/h2> <p>Google can run JavaScript, but that doesn\u2019t mean it treats everything clickable as a link. A link written the normal way puts the address inside a link tag, which tells Google where it goes. An address parked in some other element for a script to grab isn\u2019t written as a link at all.<\/p> <p>Google\u2019s links best practices documentation says Google can generally only crawl a link when it\u2019s an <code><a\/><\/code>element with an <code>href<\/code> attribute, and that it can\u2019t reliably extract URLs from elements that behave like links through script events.<\/p> <p>So the button doesn\u2019t turn into a link with its words hidden; it stops being a link. The FAQ link is unaffected, and visitors clicking the button end up in the same place.<\/p> <h2>What Mueller Suggested Instead<\/h2> <p>His suggestion leaves the button alone. You move the FAQ link earlier in the page\u2019s code so it comes first, then use CSS to put everything back where visitors expect it. The code order changes, the page looks the same, and both links stay links.<\/p> <p>Google\u2019s Martin Splitt made the same point in an SEO 101 session years ago, where his guidance was to use proper anchor markup and avoid buttons and click handlers as navigation.<\/p> <h2>Why This Matters<\/h2> <p>Internal anchor text has been an SEO lever for years. That\u2019s why a plan like this sounds reasonable. It also means your homepage\u2019s main button stops being a link, and Mueller wouldn\u2019t expect you to see anything for it.<\/p> <h2>Looking Ahead<\/h2> <p>First link priority has gone unconfirmed since at least 2008, roughly as long as people have been running tests to pin it down, and one Reddit reply won\u2019t end that. Anyone who keeps testing it now has Mueller\u2019s version to work from, which changes the order in the code without taking a link away. He gave no indication that changing that order would produce a visible difference.<\/p> <\/div> <p>News,On-Page SEO#Googles #Mueller #Link #Priority #amp #Link #Obfuscation #sejournal #MattGSouthern1784079227<\/p> ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google Search Advocate John Mueller responded to a plan to hide a homepage button from Google in hopes that a better-worded link further down the page would count instead. He suspects the person behind it is overthinking it. The r\/bigseo thread starts with a question about a homepage that links to the same services page [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11652,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[87,179,2123,90,180,46312,17475,80],"class_list":["post-11651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-accessibility","tag-amp","tag-googles","tag-link","tag-mattgsouthern","tag-mueller","tag-obfuscation","tag-priority","tag-sejournal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11651\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}