First-link priority: the old rule that quietly reshapes your anchor accounting

First-link priority: the old rule that quietly reshapes your anchor accounting

A durable piece of folklore, with some empirical backing, is the "first link counts" rule: when a page links to the same destination twice, Google may credit the anchor of only the first link and ignore the second.

If true, it has a sharp consequence for anchor profiling. Your navigation or breadcrumb often links to a page first, with a branded or generic anchor, before any in-content descriptive link appears further down. The descriptive anchor you carefully chose may be the second link to that URL — and silently discounted.

On one hand, controlled experiments by practitioners (placing two links with different anchors to the same target and observing which influenced ranking) found the first anchor winning often enough to take the rule seriously. On the other, results were inconsistent across tests, and Google has never confirmed a current implementation, so it may be partial, contextual, or deprecated.

A 2019 replication attempt found the effect present but weaker than the original claims — possibly an artifact of how the test pages were crawled.

Limitation: every test conflates link order with link position-on-page, which independently affects weighting.

Practical read: if a descriptive internal anchor matters, ensure it isn't preceded by a navigational link to the same URL on that page.

Open question: does first-link priority still hold in a rendering-and-passage-aware crawler, or did it die with simpler HTML parsing?