First link priority is the theory that when a page contains two or more links to the same URL, Google only uses the anchor text of the first link it finds in the HTML and ignores the rest. Google has never confirmed it as a rule. The most recent public test, by Zyppy in 2023, shows that Google reads the first text link and the first image link, and in July 2026 John Mueller answered someone trying to exploit it with a blunt "I suspect you're overthinking it".
It sounds like SEO forum trivia.
Then you open the source of any page and notice that almost half the internal links point to a URL that's already linked higher up.
The menu says "SEO". In the text, three paragraphs down, the link says "SEO consultancy for manufacturers". If the theory is true, Google reads "SEO" and throws away the phrase you chose so carefully.
The mistakes we find most often are always the same:
- menu items written for the designer ("Services", "Discover", "GEO") rather than for the person searching;
- logos and linked images with an empty alt or just the brand name;
- tricks to "hide" the menu link from Google, copied from 2011 blog posts.
On Google UK's first page for "first link priority seo" (10 October 2026) you'll find a hosting company's knowledge base, Search Engine Journal's 2021 article, Zyppy's study, two guides from 2026 and a Reddit thread. They explain the theory. We wanted to know how often the problem actually shows up on real pages, so before writing we measured it.
Our reason for caring is practical. Macropix, a Milan-based maker of custom LED screens, went from nowhere to first position on Google Italy for "ledwall" (LED wall), 4,400 searches a month, and has a page for every major installation, from the LED wall at CityLife to Milan Design Week. Dozens of pages linking to the same product pages.
And when the pages linking to the same URL number in the dozens?
The question of which link counts stops being theoretical. The full case is in our guide to SEO for manufacturers.
Here you'll find:
- where the rule comes from and the six public tests from 2008 to 2026, including one by an Italian SEO;
- what Google has said, with the exact words and dates;
- our test on 20 Italian pages ranking on page one for internal linking searches;
- how to check your own site and what to change (not much).
Let's start.
What first link priority is (and why it's about the code, not the screen)
First link priority is about anchor text, meaning the clickable text of a link: if page A links to page B twice, only the text of the first link would count. "First" means first in the order of the HTML, not the first one you see on screen.
This is where the theory gets concrete. In most WordPress themes the header with the menu is written into the code before the content. So when a page is linked from both the menu and the text, the first link Google meets is the menu link, even if the link you crafted sits three paragraphs further down. In the test you'll find below, the first link was in the template in 83 cases out of 242.
The example that made the rule famous comes from Rand Fishkin, then head of SEOmoz, in his post of 16 March 2008: a homepage links to the blog twice, in the menu with the anchor "blog" and in the text with "celebrity news blog". According to their internal tests, the second anchor wouldn't have helped the blog rank for "celebrity news".
The topic overlaps with two things we've already covered: how to write anchor text and how many internal links a page really needs. Here we focus on one case only: the same URL linked more than once from the same page.
The six public tests, from 2008 to 2026 (and one is Italian)
There's no Google document on first link priority. There are tests, statements and a forum debate that has been running for 18 years. Put in order, they tell a different story from the one that does the rounds.
| Year | Who | What they did | What they found |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2008 | Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz | Internal tests, quoted at SEMpdx | Only the first anchor to a URL counts |
| 2011 | Giuseppe Pastore, Posizionamento Zen | 5 links from one page to another, made-up words, checked after 3 weeks | The second direct link doesn't count; links with #, with a parameter + canonical and with a 301 redirect do |
| 2014 | Matt Cutts, Google | Video for Google Webmasters | Both links pass PageRank; the anchor had last been checked in 2009 |
| 2018 | John Mueller, Google | Answer in office hours | No defined rule, the algorithm may choose |
| 2023 | Cyrus Shepard, Zyppy | 3 tests with the Search Console link text report | The first text link plus the first image link count |
| 2026 | John Mueller, Google | Answer on Reddit | "I suspect you're overthinking it" |
Sources: original posts linked in the text. Table compiled by Visilay on 9 October 2026.
The most interesting test, for us, is the second one. Giuseppe Pastore, an Italian SEO consultant, published it on Moz on 17 January 2011, using his blog Posizionamento Zen. He created a page about the made-up term "Grisofallicolo" and linked it five times to a second page, each time with a non-existent word as the anchor ("gusopio", "socofaltignono" and so on).
After three weeks the destination page ranked for the first anchor. For the second, linked to the exact same URL, it didn't. For the other three, which pointed to the same document with a #, with a parameter plus canonical and with a 301 redirect, it did.
So the rule is confirmed?
It was confirmed in 2011, on pages with no external links and with meaningless words. That's the limit of all these experiments: they work in the lab, and Google has changed a great deal since. Nobody has republished those three "tricks" with a recent test.
What Google says (and what it doesn't)
Google has never put first link priority in writing. The official documentation on links, updated on 10 December 2025, says three things that matter here:
- anchor text should be "descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant";
- for image links, Google uses the alt attribute as the anchor text;
- Google generally only crawls a link if it's an HTML a element with an href.
On the double link, though, there are only spoken statements.
Matt Cutts, then head of the webspam team, explains in a 2014 video that if two links go to the same page "twice as much PageRank would go to that page", but admits the last check on anchor text dated back to 2009.
John Mueller, in a 2018 hangout reported by Search Engine Journal, says "this isn't something we have defined" and that having several links to the same page "is completely normal".
In July 2026, on Reddit, someone asked him whether to remove the link from the "Services" button at the top of the homepage, leaving Google only the link in the FAQs with the right anchor. His answer, reported by Matt G. Southern in Search Engine Journal on 14 July 2026: "I wouldn't expect you to see any visible change there". And if you really want to try, move the links with CSS or JavaScript rather than breaking the HTML.
In plain terms: Google won't tell you which link wins, but it does tell you not to hide any of them.
In our map of ranking factors, first link priority sits in the low-impact band.
Selective link priority: the first text link and the first image
Selective link priority is the name Cyrus Shepard of Zyppy gave to the behaviour he observed in his study of 12 April 2023: Google doesn't take only the first link, but the first text link and the first image link to the same URL.
The method is simple and repeatable. Isolated pages, linked from another site with specific anchors, then a check of the Search Console report that lists link text. Three tests:
- image, then text: Google records both anchors;
- text, text, image: it records the first text and the image, even though the image was the last link on the page; the second text disappears;
- text, text, image, text: again the first text and the first image, nothing else.
In no test did Google show more than one text anchor and one image anchor for the same destination. Shepard updated the page on 18 September 2026 announcing a new round of tests, comparing menu and text links: the results haven't been published yet.
What changes in practice?
The alt text of a linked image counts as an anchor, and it's often the most neglected one on the page. The logo that goes to the homepage, the thumbnail that goes to the article, the banner that goes to the service.
In our Italian sample, which you'll see in the next section, at least 4 of the 35 "menu before text" cases were images: logos and photos with alt text like "quindo" or "seo roma prati logo", ahead of text links saying "agenzia seo" (SEO agency) or "seo roma prati".
How often it happens on real sites (our test on 20 Italian pages)
To see whether the problem really exists, we analysed 20 pages from 18 Italian websites that on 9 October 2026 were on page one of Google Italy, on mobile, for "link interni seo" (internal links SEO), "anchor text" and "più link alla stessa pagina seo" (multiple links to the same page SEO). They're the guides that explain to everyone else how to do internal linking. We ran the test on the Italian market, where we work; the HTML of a WordPress theme works the same way on a .co.uk site.
The method: SERPs collected with DataForSEO, source HTML downloaded the same day, a count of links to the same domain. A link counts as "template" when it sits inside a nav, header, footer or aside element, or in a container with classes such as menu, sidebar or breadcrumb. Twenty-one URLs tested, one blocked the download.
| What we measured | Value |
|---|---|
| Total internal links | 1,735 |
| Distinct destination URLs | 947 |
| Destinations linked 2 or more times from the same page | 489 (51.6%) |
| Links pointing to a URL already linked higher up | 788 (45.4%) |
| Duplicated destinations with different anchors between links | 180 (36.8%) |
| Duplicated destinations with at least one link in the body text | 242 |
| Of these, with the first link in the code in the menu or template | 83 (34.3%) |
| Of these, with the first link in the template and an anchor different from the text | 35 (14.5%) |
| Pages with at least one such case | 15 of 20 |
Source: Visilay analysis of 20 pages on page one of Google Italy, 9 October 2026. Unrendered HTML: menus generated with JavaScript are not included.
The number to remember is the last one: in 15 guides out of 20, at least one link written in the body text comes after a menu or template link with a different anchor. If first link priority applied to the letter, that carefully chosen anchor wouldn't be read.
Some examples, first link in the code against the link in the text:
| Site | Anchor of the first link (template) | Anchor in the text |
|---|---|---|
| SupportHost | managed cloud | managed vps cloud |
| one.com | visualizza tutti gli articoli (view all articles) | marketing online (online marketing) |
| Not Only Seo | seo | ottimizzare al meglio i link interni (get the most out of internal links) |
| Quindo | logo image, alt "quindo" | agenzia seo (SEO agency) |
| Seo Roma Prati | consulenza seo (SEO consultancy) | nelle loro strategie seo (in their SEO strategies) |
Is this someone else's problem?
No. We ran the same count on four articles on our own blog: 310 internal links, 64 destinations out of 232 linked more than once (27.6%). In four cases the menu comes before the text with a different anchor. The most obvious one: the menu item says "GEO", the text says "SEO for generative engines". Guess which of the two describes the page better.
The menu repeats the same anchor on every page of the site. It's the most repeated link text you have, and almost nobody chooses it with search in mind.
Is your menu choosing your anchors for you?
It happens in 15 guides out of 20 in our sample, and on our own site too. We analyse the internal links of the pages that bring you enquiries, find the menu items and linked images that say nothing useful, and decide what to rewrite before touching the content.
Book a strategy consultationHow to check your site (in half an hour)
You check this with a crawler, not by eye. Here's our process with Screaming Frog SEO Spider, whose free version is enough for up to 500 URLs:
- Crawl the site and open the Inlinks tab for the 5-10 pages that bring you enquiries.
- Look at the Link Position column: Screaming Frog gives every link a position (navigation, header, footer, content and others).
- Find source pages with two links to the same destination and compare the anchors: if the first is "Services" and the second "solar panels for farms", you've found a case.
- Check the alt text of linked images: logos, thumbnails, banners. An empty alt is an empty anchor.
- Compare source and rendered HTML if the menu is built with JavaScript: the order of the links can change.
The Links report in Google Search Console doesn't help here: it only shows link text for external links, not internal ones. It's the same report Shepard used for his tests, with links coming from another site.
This check is one item on the checklist we use in every SEO audit, along with orphan pages and crawl depth.
What to change (and what to leave alone)
The practical rule is simple: make the first link descriptive, instead of trying to hide the second.
Do:
- Rewrite the vaguest menu items. "Services" can stay as the dropdown label, but the items underneath should say what's on the page: "SEO consultancy", not "Discover". On our site the first one to rewrite is "GEO".
- Write the alt text of every linked image as you'd write the anchor: what the person clicking will find.
- Put the most descriptive contextual link high up in the text, in the first paragraphs, rather than at the end of the article.
- Use breadcrumbs with the real category name, because they also sit in the code before the content.
Don't:
- Don't remove the href from the menu or turn it into a JavaScript button to "make room" for the link in the text: that's exactly what Mueller advised against in 2026, and you risk Google no longer crawling that path. We cover it in our guide to crawling.
- Don't add # or parameters to URLs to make a second anchor count. It worked in Pastore's 2011 test; nobody has shown it works today, and a URL with extra parameters is a technical SEO problem you create for yourself.
- Don't cut links for fear of duplicates. Mueller said it in 2018: two links to the same page are normal.
And if I'm redesigning the site?
That's the best time to fix it, because menus and templates are decided once. Add it to the checklist for SEO during a website redesign, next to redirects and site architecture.
Who it isn't worth it for (and what it isn't)
First link priority isn't a ranking factor you can switch on. It's a hypothesis about how Google chooses which anchors to read when there are too many pointing to the same place.
If your site has orphan pages, thin content or two pages competing for the same search, those problems weigh far more. Screaming Frog shows them in the same crawl: start there.
Nor is it about backlinks in the way people usually worry about: if a site links to you twice from the same article, the second anchor probably adds nothing, but it takes nothing away either.
First link priority FAQs
No. Google has never confirmed it, and in 2018 John Mueller said there is no defined rule. It's a hypothesis about which anchor text gets read when a page links to the same URL more than once.
It depends: what counts is the order in the HTML, not the position on screen. In most themes the menu is written before the content, so if a page is linked from both the menu and the text, the first link is the menu one. In our test on 20 Italian pages, the first link was in the template in 83 cases out of 242.
It depends: Zyppy's 2023 tests used links from another site, and Google recorded only the first text anchor and the first image anchor. A second link from the same article probably doesn't add a new anchor, but it doesn't take anything away.
No. The first says only the first link to a URL counts. The second, observed by Cyrus Shepard in 2023, says the first text link and the first image link both count.
No. Giuseppe Pastore's 2011 test showed it working, but nobody has repeated it with recent results, and it creates URL variants you then have to manage.
No. Two links to the same page are normal, as Mueller has said. It's better to make the first one descriptive, starting with menu items and the alt text of linked images.
Five things to remember
Google has never confirmed first link priority.
The tests say: first text link plus first image link.
Mueller in 2026: "you're overthinking it".
On the sites we analysed, 45 internal links in 100 point to a URL that's already linked.
In 15 guides out of 20, the menu or template comes before the text, with a different anchor.
The point the industry rarely makes is a different one. We've been arguing for 18 years about which link Google reads first, and meanwhile the menu items, which are the anchors repeated on every page of the site, are usually chosen by whoever designs the header. If you want internal linking work that's worth your time, start there: it's where we start in our SEO service, before writing a single line of new content.
Until next time!
