Google search advocate John Mueller responded to a plan to hide a homepage button from Google in the hopes that a better-worded link further down the page would count instead. He suspects the person behind this is thinking too much about it.
THE r/bigseo thread starts with a question on a home page that links to the same services page twice. The first link is a “Services” button at the top, while the second is further down in an FAQ, written the way the person wants Google to read it.
To make the second link “win”, they plan to make the most visible button stop being a link. It would still work when someone clicks on it, but the page code would no longer call it a link. This leaves the FAQ link as the only regular link on the page pointing to the services page.
They asked in the thread if it would make a visible difference.
What Mueller said
Mueller responded in the thread:
“I suspect you’re overthinking it, Google is used to dealing with a lot of websites, so I wouldn’t expect you to see a visible change there.
That said, if you want to experiment with this, I suggest doing something extra, like using CSS/JS to position elements on the page, regardless of where the link is placed in the HTML. This reduces the potential negative side effects of “breaking” the HTML (turning links into buttons, or similar, ugh) while still allowing you to vary the position in your page’s HTML.
He did not say whether the first link would win. His answer concerns the magnitude of the effect and the cost of continuing it.
Why would anyone try this
The idea behind this plan is called first link priority. It states that when a page links to another page twice, Google reads the words from the first link and ignores the second. If this were true, the button would win and the FAQ link would be wasted.
Google has never clearly defined “first link priority”. SEJs ranking factors chapter on first link priority traces the idea back to a 2008 Rand Fishkin article and finds nothing to treat it as a rule you can rely on. Mueller has previously said that Google has not defined the behavior and that what is understood about how Google does it today is not necessarily how it will work tomorrow.
Despite everything, the idea continues to circulate. Roger Montti from SEJ covered a similar concern about anchor text dilution last April.
What Google Sees
Google can run JavaScript, but that doesn’t mean it treats everything clickable as a link. A normally written link puts the address in a link tag, which tells Google where it goes. An address parked in another element for a script to retrieve is not written as a link at all.
Google links to best practices documentation says that Google can generally only crawl a link when it is a element with a href and that it cannot reliably extract URLs from elements that behave like links via script events.
Thus, the button does not transform into a link with its hidden words; it ceases to be a link. The FAQ link is not affected and visitors who click the button end up in the same place.
What Mueller suggested instead
His suggestion leaves the button alone. You move the FAQ link earlier in the page code so it appears first, then use CSS to put everything back where visitors expect it. The order of the code changes, the page remains the same and the two links remain links.
Google’s Martin Splitt made the same point in an SEO 101 session years ago, where his advice was to use proper anchor markup and avoid buttons and click handlers when navigating.
Why it matters
Internal anchor text has been an SEO lever for years. That’s why a plan like this seems reasonable. This also means that the main button on your homepage ceases to be a link and Mueller wouldn’t expect you to see anything in return.
Looking to the future
The priority of the first link hasn’t been confirmed since at least 2008, about as long as people have been testing to pin it down, and a Reddit response won’t put an end to that. Anyone who continues to test it now has Mueller’s version, which changes the order in the code without removing a link. He gave no indication that changing this order would make a visible difference.
