Ordered lists of services not placed contextually inside content

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Michael Stricker: If I get this correctly, internal linking establishes a crawlpaths of relevance and Best springs from a stream of single-minded content. Otherwise, a list of links is navigation, instead of reinforcing, deepening or detailing themes. On-page, contextual list links are great UX in long-firm content, and, since they occur on a page dedicated to a single topic, they reinforce that focus, especially when they are tagged HTML headers (H2-H6) so that content achieves granularity. That can enhance a page’s ability to rank for multiple queries or earn Rich Snippets such as Answerboxes. Hope I got your intent and that this helps!
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  Adam John Humphreys: Ya, I was hoping for an answer around a patent referring to the treatment of content that doubles as links. It`s not always practical to have lists of words people don`t necessarily understand without linking them to pages so they can comprehend what it is those services mean to them to add value. I have seen ordered lists in local SEO ranking for pages with just services listed of which all were linking to appropriate service pages. There was no content so to speak of other then address and those links. As stated my thinking is that those links are considered content as well but discounted when not placed contextually. Some patents oversimplify the handling of links but doesn`t really elaborate overly on how the contextual aspect can work in an ordered list. A proximity patent I read considers the keyword in the header and the first word in each line of the ordered list for example if it`s just words. While I have always been able to see the intent of Google without patent hunting this is one I am looking to dig deeper on. Bill Slawski any insights?
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  Adam John Humphreys: Reply from John Mueller so far is that’s awfully specific 😝 Hoping it’s not a limitation of search engines but it may.