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To understand how Google works you absolutely must read the original paper on The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine [www7.scu.edu.au]. It was written a few years ago, and probably a lot of the details have changed. Nevertheless many of us believe that it still offers an unparalleled view into the thinking that went into the design of Google.
To answer your questions: There is no evidence that Google measures either clickthroughs or duration of sessions.
Every link on a page counts the same, the placement doesn't matter
A few instances where I think this would not be true:
-link on the top of the page under a keyword-rich H1 heading or text toolbar
-link at the bottom of the page above a keyword-rich disclaimer, etc.--there's usually text at the bottom of pages
-the 200th link is at the bottom of a page that's >100K.
A few instances where I think this would not be true:
-link on the top of the page under a keyword-rich H1 heading or text toolbar
-link at the bottom of the page above a keyword-rich disclaimer, etc.--there's usually text at the bottom of pages
-the 200th link is at the bottom of a page that's >100K.
I don't have seen any evidence for the first or the second point. (Also, in the original algorithm about PR calculation it doesn't matter where you place the link.)
The third point might be true. However, there was a discussion that Google shows links as backlinks well beyond 101K and '100 links' limits. [webmasterworld.com]
I also think this is true! But do you have anything to back this up?
I'd say it's possible knowing Google considers a link's surrounding text.
In a similar discussion before, I remember Tedster saying he did some experiments using some unique words surrounding link text and still saw no results for them. It was significant for me bcoz I was about to do the same experiments.
But do you have anything to back this up?
No, but with internal link placement, I approach this as: you'll never be penalized for putting the most relevant link close to whatever text you can squeeze on to a link page. It may not count now, but it might tomorrow.
With external link placement, I wouldn't ask for preferred placement, but it might matter with some SEs and from a raw referral standpoint, I'd bet the top or bottom links fare better than the middle of the page.
When google calculating an importance of a link:1.Does google look at the number of click troughs and duration of sessions from that link?
2.Placement of the link ( Does a link from the bottom of a web page important as one from the top)
Google does have (future?) ideas on these things - the questions remains how well they can be implemented or be kept spam free:
1. A Google patent: "Methods and apparatus for employing usage statistics in document retrieval" [appft1.uspto.gov]
[0036] The frequency of visit score equals log2(1+log(VF)/log(MAXVF). VF is the number of times that the document was visited (or accessed) in one month, and MAXVF is set to 2000. A small value is used when VF is unknown. If the unique user is less than 10, it equals 0.5*UU/10; otherwise, it equals 0.5*(1+UU/MAXUU). UU is the number of unique hosts/IPs that access the document in one month, and MAXUU is set to 400. A small value is used when UU is unknown. The path length score equals log(K-PL)/log(K). PL is the number of `/` characters in the document's path, and K is set to 20.
2. from Henzinger, Motwani and Silverstein: Challenges in Web Search Engines [citeseer.nj.nec.com]
To give just one example, users have grown accustomed to ignoring text on the periphery of a web page [12], which in many cases consists of navigational elements of advertisements. Search engines could use positional information, as expressed in the layout code to adjust the weight given to various sections of text in the document.