In the Google Search Central SEO Office Hours on January 28, a user asked if the placement of internal links matter.
Does it matter if the link is in the anchor text in the body, in the header, footer, or sidebars?
Does the body content have more weight as the content changes from page to page, in comparison to the header and footer that mainly remains the same?
John Mueller responded, not necessarily. For internal links, Google uses the links to understand the context of things better. For example, the anchor text.
Another important part of internal links is being able to crawl the site. For this case, it does not matter where the link is on the page to be able to crawl the rest of the website. Sometimes, the links are in the footer, sometimes in the header, the menu, the sidebar, or within the body content.
All of these link placements are fine.
From Google’s point of view, what is more differentiated with regards to the location on a page is the content itself. Google tries to figure out what is relevant for the particular page and it makes sense to focus on the central part of the page. The primary piece of content that changes from page to page.
The headers, footers, sidebars are not the primary reason for the page to exist and also not the primary reason for them to rank the page.
Those are the differences that they take into consideration when it comes to the different parts of the page.
For links, it’s usually more to understand the context of pages and to be able to crawl the website. For that, they do not need to differentiate between the different parts of the page, when it comes to internal links.
Based on his answer, looks like the location of internal links do not matter. You can place them in the header, footer, sidebar, body content. No placement is more powerful than the others.
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