<b>Does internal link <i>position</i> beat anchor text? A teardown.</b>

<b>Does internal link <i>position</i> beat anchor text? A teardown.</b>

We obsess over internal anchor text. But a links-position hypothesis says links higher in the main content pass more weight than footer/sidebar links to the same URL.

— Across 9 sites, I tagged every internal link to a set of target pages by DOM position: in-body (within article prose), navigation, or footer.
— Target pages whose internal links were predominantly in-body ranked a median of 6 positions higher than comparable pages linked mainly from sidebars/footers.
— Changing only anchor text (without moving the link) produced smaller, noisier movement in my before/after sample.

The nuance: position and anchor are entangled. In-body links tend to have more descriptive anchors anyway. The cleanest cases were footer-link-only pages: adding one contextual in-body link from a relevant article often moved them more than re-optimizing existing anchors.

Caveat: "comparable pages" is doing heavy lifting; topic competitiveness varied.

Method note: DOM-position tagging via a crawl script, paired with rank deltas over 60 days on 9 consenting sites.

Confidence: medium