<b>The first-link rule and what it does to your anchor accounting</b>
A quietly consequential edge case: when a single page links to the same target twice, there is long-standing evidence that the engine may count only the first link's anchor and ignore the second. If true, a meaningful slice of the anchors in your audit are being silently discarded.
The original 'first link counts' observation came from independent tests years ago and has been partially corroborated since, though never officially confirmed in current form. The implication for distribution is direct: navigational and header links, which appear first in the DOM, may be claiming the anchor credit that your in-content links assume they're getting.
— Your carefully written in-body anchor may be the second link from that page and thus inert.
— A boilerplate logo or nav link, appearing first, may be the one anchor that actually registers.
On one hand, this would mean template-level links disproportionately shape the counted distribution. On the other, the rule's current status is genuinely uncertain — engines may now consolidate or weight differently than the original tests found.
Limitation: this rests on aging third-party experiments, and I have seen no recent controlled replication, so treating it as live behavior is provisional.
Open question: if only the first link's anchor counts per page, how much of every published anchor study is measuring strings the engine threw away?
Anchor Theory
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<b>The first-link rule and what it does to your anchor accounting</b>
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