John Mueller of Google said that by just moving a link from one position on a page to another position on a page - you likely won't see any ranking boost from that action. He said on Twitter "I wouldn't assume that you'd get a boost out of just moving links from one part of the page to another part though."
Here are those tweets:
Usually the usability recommendations map well to SEO too :-). I wouldn't assume that you'd get a boost out of just moving links from one part of the page to another part though.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 9, 2021
Sure, moving links around from a usability perspective might make sense. But for SEO purposes alone, it probably won't make a huge difference in your rankings.
There are probably exceptions to this, like having a link in your footer's legal disclaimer versus your body content - that probably is a bigger change from Google's perspective.
Here is a somewhat related tweet:
Ah, got it, thanks! Having multiple links to the same URL within a single page doesn't cause any problems. Sometimes it makes sense to do that for usability reasons. It doesn't change crawling, so it wouldn't affect the crawl budget.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 9, 2021
This tweet above we covered in a lot more detail last June over here.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
