One SEO professional asked John Mueller during a submitted Question and Answer segment on his hangout whether visually separated links have more weight than other links.
The question was: are there any crawl issues if posts on a category page are sorted by last modification date, instead of the published date?
John explained that no, it doesn’t matter. In particular, if Google is looking at an HTML page, the order of links is not related to the order of Google’s overall crawling of these pages on a website.
As long as these links are on the HTML page, and Google can follow them, they can pick that up and use that.
John thinks it may get a bit tricky if you have paginated pages, and the newest link is on page 10 of that paginated set, then Google first has to crawl all of those 10 pages leading up to that and then find that new link.
This is something that John would try to avoid.
But, if it’s all on the same HTML page, and you have either an order by last modification date or an order by published date, and these are visible on the HTML page, then that is good enough for Google.
This happens at approximately the 29:37 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 29:27
Are there any crawling issues if posts on a category page are sorted by last modification date instead of published date?
John (Submitted Question) 29:34
No. So in particular, if we’re looking at an HTML page, the order of the links on there on is not related to the order of our overall crawling of those pages on the website. So as long as those links are on the HTML page, and we can follow them, we can essentially pick that up and use that. I think it might get a little bit tricky if you have things like paginated pages and the newest link is on page 10 of that paginated set, then we first have to crawl all of those 10 pages leading up to that and then find that new link. That’s something I would try to avoid. But if it’s all on the same HTML page, and you have kind of like either an order by last modification date or an order by published date, and they’re kind of visible on the HTML page, then that’s good enough for us.
