"First link" priority in Google

Here is a very important article from the Market Samurai blog:

http://www.noblesamurai.com/blog/market-samurai/website-optimization-first-link-priority-2306 

Basically, it says that if you have more than 1 outbound link to the same domain in your article, Google will count only the first one and ignore the rest.

This becomes very significant (and possibly damaging) for your SEO efforts, if you have a linked-out image at the beginning of your post, without the possibility of a proper anchor text. And no - the alt-tag won't count as anchor text.

Thank you so much for sharing this! I can see that there are several places that I should reverse the links so that I get some credit for the keyword relevancy.

OK feeling ignorant now...but what is the difference of the anchor text and alt tag :)

Hi Kathy

The anchor text is the keyword for the hyperlink

e.g. <a href="http://www.squidooroo.com/">social media training program</a>

Here "social media training program" is the anchor text because I have linked the URL http://www.squidooroo.com to that keyword.  I could link it to any relevant keyword and Google will create that association in its indexing.  It's a good idea to have anchor text different  to that of the website URL because Google already registers the URL, so using "squidooroo" as the anchor text does not add anything to Google's index (it's already picked this up from the URL).

Alt text = alternative text - it was originally designed to help people with poor eyesight to give them an alternative form other than the image (and thus able to be read by text readers that can enlarge text) - so it's original purpose was for web accessibility for the sight-impaired who can't see images.  So it should describe the image, e.g. picture of a butcher bird.  However, most Internet marketers use it as a way of linking the image to a keyword for Google's indexing purposes.

<a href="http://example.com/">anchor text</a>

<a href="http://example.com/" alt="example">anchor text</a>

<a href="http://example.com/" title="hover me">anchor text</a>

<a href="http://example.com/" title="hover me" alt="example">anchor text</a>

Thanks Ron :-)

Not sure I totally understand this.  Are you saying a sales page like this:  Pajamas with Cats  is not good for Google because it has several links to Cafe Press?  Do you discourage sales pages here?

Au contraire, Dianne. We Wizzleys are all about making money.

If you refer to the original post of this thread...it's about "first link priority". Has nothing to do with sales pages.

If you refer to something later in this thread, please clarify.

And, welcome to you, too. It's wonderful to have you with us. 

Thanks Chef!

Thanks Ron...that was very helpful...sure hope you didn't see me slap my head as I said..."Duh" LOL :)

@Hans...thank you too...although I have to admit yours was harder to figure out...LOL :)

That's because Hans was speaking in German geekese.  Ron was translating from geekese to English.  LOL.