First Link Priority & Dead Aliens in Russia
Dead alien in Russia video
@ricraftis asked us on our Facebook page whether we had seen a less videos appear in the SERPS recently. We have. Have you? I’ve seen quite a few reports claiming that this is because Google thinks they detract from you clicking on the ads, which I think is nonsense. So today I have a look at a video that has gone ballistic in the last 36 hours. The “Dead Alien In Russia” video has had over 2 million views since it was published on Monday night. As it’s such a popular video it’s a good one to see how it’s performing in the SERPs.I’ve got no idea about the content of the video but it’s a good one to study for this exercise.
First Link Priority
There was a great blog post from Ben Stickland over at Market Samurai this week talking about the 1st link priority technique. I won’t repeat what Ben has already written but basically there is a school of thought that says if you link to a target page more than once on any given page,the first link that Google finds on that page will have the authority and Google will ignore the other links to the target page on that same page. This can be an issue if you are trying to give your home page a certain amount of keyword authority as you link back to it throughout your site with a specific keyword. If, like a lot of sites though, you are linking your logo at the top of your page to your home page as well, Google will find this link first and ignore your keyword rich link. The logo link does not contain a keyword in it.
Ben suggests a technique that some people may feel is a little bit grey hat. We prefer a more white hat approach to this problem. If you do have the logo linked to your home page, why not link it to say /home (a faux page) and then 301 that to the root. Then your keyword rich link will get the priority. We learned that technique from @danthies. More details in the video.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
