Link Juice

There are several methods for obtaining links from the web, both direct and indirect. Direct effort tactics include document sharing, guest posting, social media marketing, news release distribution, and others.

The indirect effort is obtained by offering good content on your site, which motivates users to spread it throughout the web, automatically connecting the sites. The link equity that transfers from these sites to your site is known as link juice, and the authority of this link juice varies based on the sites that link to you.

Let’s take a deep dive into the world of link juice. What is it? How do websites pass link juice between them? How can you use this feature of search engine optimization to support the domain authority of your website? For answers to these questions and more, read on below!

What is link juice? 

The term “link juice” is a common one in discussions of how Google ranks websites. This is a word used in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to describe the amount of authority or value that one backlink provides to the website with whom it links.

Link juice is also known as “link equity” in the SEO business. Backlinks from websites that have greater authority and relevance on a topic will create more link juice and help a page rank higher in search engine results pages (SERP).

In general, the more link juice (link equity) a website has, the more likely it is to rank for its keywords in Google and other search engines. The rank of a page is determined by a number of criteria.

Strong backlinks provide only one (essential) component of the puzzle; there are other ranking factors, but backlinks are possibly the most important one. PageRank, Google’s real evaluation of how authoritative a page is, is also sometimes mistaken with link juice.

(Google has officially “sunsetted” PageRank, but most SEOs believe that Google still utilizes something to judge a page’s worth, which affects its potential to rank). The “value” of how a page’s PageRank is conveyed via each individual backlink is referred to as link equity.

However, not all links produce the all-powerful link juice. Websites with higher authority are regarded as more trustworthy by Google, and their links carry more weight.

How Does Link Juice Work?

Link juice improves your page’s ranking in search engines.

Although it is not the only ranking element, it is frequently mentioned as one of the top-ranking signals. Internal linking allows link juice flowing to a page to spread across your website. Numerous studies have found that internal linkage correlates with higher ranks.

For the purposes of this explanation, it is critical to understand that when link juice arrives on a page, it is possible to redirect it to other areas of your site and assist other sites in ranking higher.

Assume you have two sites, A and B. If all other ranking indicators remain constant and site A has one page linking to it and site B has none, site A will rank better in search results owing to the link juice provided by the external site connecting to it.

What if site B also receives one page link? This is determined by the amount of juice passed across each connection.

Another thing to remember is that link juice flows in both directions. Assume that the sites linked to site A all link to other sites, but the sites referring to site B only link to B.

That means that site A will only be getting part of the total link juice that could connect to it, while B receives all of the link juice that the links pass to it.

It used to be possible to use nofollow links to prevent the loss of link juice through outbound links. This process was commonly known as PageRank sculpting and was used to manipulate the way each link passes link juice between important pages.

That is no longer possible; no follow links now still count as links, so the link juice just spills out into nowhere if you put the nofollow attribute on one of your outgoing links.

How is link juice calculated?

It is critical to understand that link juice is a descriptive word for how authority flows through do-follow links. It is not something that can be calculated or quantified with great precision, especially given how secretive Google is about its algorithm and how it analyzes connections.

However, there are key factors that SEOs and SEO tools consider when calculating how much value a link passes on to the page to which it links. Some of these include:

The website authority of the page the link is from

If a link is from a reputable website with a long history and a large amount of high-quality material, the link will be more valuable than a connection from a less authoritative website. Part of this is the HTTP status of the page.

A page with an HTTPS tag is given far more authority than one with a plain HTTP prefix.

The basic type of link

The “no-follow” property informs crawlers that a link should not be followed. Although most people agree that no-follow links have some significance, it is the do-follow links that convey authority across pages.

The content of the page

The relevancy of the content, the quantity of other links on the page, and the position of the link on the page, among other factors, can all have an influence on the value of a backlink.

A link inside the body of a web page, for example, transfers more link juice than a link near the bottom of the page. Similarly, authoritative and valuable content tends to be more valuable than user-generated content on a free website.

How to get more link juice

External links (also known as backlinks) to your website generate link juice. That means that you can earn links by persuading more sites to direct users to your website, which will earn you additional link equity. You can get more backlinks by doing the following:

• Create content that is authoritative and valuable in order to become the go-to source for knowledge on a specific issue.
• Make your website or content a resource.
• Create genuine blog post entries for other websites in your business (guest posts).
• Join industry organizations and form alliances.
• Obtain quotes on other websites through public relations initiatives.
• Restore broken links with link reclamation techniques!

Let’s look at some of the more effective options that can get more link juice to your website.

Internal Linking

Your website is an often-overlooked source of potential link juice. Many marketers overlook pools of link juice centered on the most popular pages in their continuous search for high-value backlinks.

You probably have a reservoir of value you can pass on to your internal pages that is just waiting for you to tap into through site-wide links. Just one link can make a world of difference!

Internal linking, like other on-page SEO features, begins with keyword research (if you need assistance, there are lots of free tools available). Make a list of a few keywords that you wish to target for your page.

Locate pages on your site that contain those keywords and use intext operations to find the pages with the highest value to pass on to other pages.

You can use the following tools:

• SEO Review Tools: This is a powerful tool that determines a URL’s domain and page authority. It will also tell you how many external links point to your page. To find the URL, anchor text, and authority information for your external links, use the Link Checker tool. They also provide a bulk authority checker that allows you to search ten pages at once.
• Small SEO Tools: This is a free tool that ranks supplied URLs’ domain and page authority out of 100.
• SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer: This is another free tool. Moz’s Domain Authority, Page Authority, and inbound links may all be obtained for your page.

It is time to drain the link juice when you have compiled your lists of target keywords and high-authority pages. Use your keywords as anchor text to create links to your target website.

Avoid hyperlinking only your precise keyword matches since this may appear spammy to a search engine. When feasible, use synonyms or latent semantic keywords (LSI keywords).

Finally, any unwanted outbound links from your sites should be removed. The rel=”nofollow” element may be used to prevent transmitting link juice, but it cannot be used to raise the amount of equity passed by other internal links on the page.

The number of internal links on a page may be found in Google Search Console under Search Traffic.

External links

Link building has always been an important aspect of the SEO industry. External links might be one of the most essential search engine ranking criteria.

Each external link to your domain is a third-party declaration that your site provides something useful and beneficial to people. This means that search engines see the link juice provided from external links differently and consider it when ranking pages in search results.

So, how do you go about constructing backlinks for your website? This may appear to be a tough endeavor because getting people to point dofollow links to your page is mostly outside your control.

However, there are a few things you can do to make your outreach easier and more likely to result in backlinks.

Using hreflang for international websites

Sites that cater to people from several nations may localize or translate their material to make it accessible to all of their visitors.

The hreflang tag sends a signal to search engines, directing them to multiple versions of each page and assisting them in returning the most relevant version based on the user’s language or location.

Hreflang tags also enable the exchange of link juice between pages and their corresponding localized counterparts, laying the groundwork for these pages to rank in their respective local search engines.

It is also feasible to include hreflang tags in your XML Sitemap, resulting in a single file that directs search engines to all pages and their translated/localized versions.

Link reclamation

The act of locating and repairing outdated or broken links leading to your sites is known as link reclamation. To locate URLs that return a 404 status, use a crawler like Site Crawl or check Google Search Console’s Index Coverage report. You may find links to that page using a service like Ahrefs.

From there, it should be as simple as supplying the website owner with an updated URL (they, too, do not want a dead link on their page).

These links should not be redirected to your homepage or any unrelated website. An external site linking to your homepage like this can lead Google to consider your homepage to be a soft 404, lowering your site’s conversion rate.

Despite these consequences, it is a surprisingly common issue for several websites.

Conclusion

Link equity is an important part of link building, and the link juice passed to your site by external links pointing to your web pages is vital to the visibility of your site on Google or other search engines.

Because all links pointing to your site pass link equity, to get more link equity, all you need to do is obtain more links to your site.

Paid links are one option for this, but what you really need to be doing is ensuring that your page’s content is valuable enough for website owners to organically link to your quality content and its linked keywords.

A high number of links is important, but those links have to be good links. A good backlink passes a large amount of link juice to your site, which you can then redistribute around your other pages using internal links.

All of this helps Google to see your site as having a high level of authority and topical relevance, which helps more traffic to find pages on your site. Link juice is not the only thing you need to consider, but it is an important factor and one you can’t ignore!