Not really sure where this thought is going. However I like the idea of being able to programmatically determine the position of a link on a page. Just really trying to build up a pattern on backlinks. The vague idea is that you could say "20% of this domains backlinks are in the centre portion of a page, 10% in the lower third" etc etc.
Here's the rub : No idea how to go about this. Can't really think of a decent approach.
Closest I have got to is to have a script that takes a screen grab of a page, but modify the dom to highlight the link in a big obvious way before the shot is taken. A second process could then measure the position of the marker. That seems hugely over-engineered to me though.
I feel like I'm missing something obvious. Anyone don't anything similar, or have some ideas?
It seems like a decent way to go about it. Rather than enlarge the text I'd put in a specific coloured/sized marker which should be easier to find.
Another way would be to use a headless or real browser and just walk through the links and then using javascript to report the X & Y co-ordinates of the attribute or whether the link is visible at all.
Puts a different perceptive on the previews Google have in their SERPs now.
I haven't a clue but came across this... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7630338/using-javascript-to-find-position-of-dom-elements
and this unanswered question here - https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.tools.mfc/zi-qLUIk7RY
Hopefully it will give food for thought.
Depending on what it is you want to track them for, how about a script that tells you how many links total there are on the page and which one by order the one to your site is? May not be very helpful for pages with only a few links and a bunch of other content (e.g. text), but should at least be more scalable for large volumes of targets to check.