Google’s Mueller Reveals Shocking Truth About First Link Priority and Link Obfuscation – What SEOs Must Know Now

Ever found yourself tangled in the SEO rabbit hole, wondering if hiding a big, shiny homepage button from Google might trick it into favoring a sneakier, more eloquently worded link tucked down in an FAQ? I’ve seen plenty of clever hacks come and go, but this one really makes you scratch your head — is Google actually fooled by turning links into invisible buttons, or is that just SEO folk over-engineering their way into confusion? John Mueller, Google’s own Search Advocate, weighed in—and spoiler alert: he thinks we might be sweating the small stuff a bit too much here. Instead of breaking your code and playing hide-and-seek with links, he suggests a slick workaround that keeps everything neat and tidy both for users and the search engines. Curious how the fabled “first link priority” theory stacks up against Google’s real-world crawling? Brace yourself—this debate has been stirring since 2008, yet John’s take might just shift how we approach internal linking forever. Dive in to unravel why your homepage button’s SEO fate might not be as dramatic as you thought! LEARN MORE.

Google Search Advocate John Mueller responded to a plan to hide a homepage button from Google in hopes that a better-worded link further down the page would count instead. He suspects the person behind it is overthinking it.

The r/bigseo thread starts with a question about a homepage that links to the same services page twice. The first link is a ‘Services’ button near the top, while the second sits further down in an FAQ, worded the way the person wants Google to read it.

To get the second link to “win,” they plan to make the more prominent button stop being a link. It would still work when someone clicks it, but the page’s code wouldn’t call it a link anymore. That leaves the FAQ link as the only regular link on the page pointing to the services page.

They asked the thread whether it would make any visible difference.

What Mueller Said

Mueller replied in the thread:

“I suspect you’re overthinking it, Google has practice dealing with lots of websites so I wouldn’t expect you to see any visible change there.

That said, if you wanted to experiment with this, I’d suggest doing something more along the lines of using CSS / JS to position things on the page, regardless of where the link is placed in the HTML. That reduces the potential negative side-effects of “breaking” the HTML (turning links into buttons, or similar, ugh) while still letting you vary the position in your page’s HTML code.”

He didn’t say whether the first link wins. His answer is about the size of the effect and the cost of chasing it.

Why Anyone Would Try This

The idea behind the plan is called first link priority. It says that when one page links to another page twice, Google reads the words in the first link and ignores the second. If that were true, the button would win and the FAQ link would be wasted.

Google has never clearly defined “first link priority.” SEJ’s ranking factors chapter on first link priority traces the idea to a 2008 Rand Fishkin post and finds nothing to support treating it as a rule you can build on. Mueller has said before that Google hasn’t defined the behavior, and that whatever anyone figures out about how Google does it today isn’t necessarily how it will work tomorrow.

The idea keeps circulating anyway. SEJ’s Roger Montti covered a similar worry 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 link written the normal way puts the address inside a link tag, which tells Google where it goes. An address parked in some other element for a script to grab isn’t written as a link at all.

Google’s links best practices documentation says Google can generally only crawl a link when it’s an <a>element with an href attribute, and that it can’t reliably extract URLs from elements that behave like links through script events.

So the button doesn’t turn into a link with its words hidden; it stops being a link. The FAQ link is unaffected, and visitors clicking 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’s code so it comes first, then use CSS to put everything back where visitors expect it. The code order changes, the page looks the same, and both links stay links.

Google’s Martin Splitt made the same point in an SEO 101 session years ago, where his guidance was to use proper anchor markup and avoid buttons and click handlers as navigation.

Why This Matters

Internal anchor text has been an SEO lever for years. That’s why a plan like this sounds reasonable. It also means your homepage’s main button stops being a link, and Mueller wouldn’t expect you to see anything for it.

Looking Ahead

First link priority has gone unconfirmed since at least 2008, roughly as long as people have been running tests to pin it down, and one Reddit reply won’t end that. Anyone who keeps testing it now has Mueller’s version to work from, which changes the order in the code without taking a link away. He gave no indication that changing that order would produce a visible difference.