Seo
Jun 21, 2026
Why a Footer Link and a Content Link Are Not the Same — Link Equity, Context, and the Reasonable Surfer Model
A link extractor shows every link on a page — but navigation, footer, and sidebar links that appear on every page by template are not the same as editorial content links. Google's Reasonable Surfer model assigns different link equity probabilities based on position, anchor text, and click likelihood. Here's what distinguishes content links from structural links, how to use extracted link data to find content link patterns, and why anchor text diversity matters for internal linking signals.