One of the most important SEO terms that is necessary to know for fundamental understanding of how SEO works is link juice: value or equity passed from one site to another in a link. Although Google doesn’t disclose exactly how much weight link juice has in its ranking algorithm, all practical observations says it’s a lot.
Today, let’s talk link juice and how it impacts SEO.
What is Link Juice in SEO?
Link juice or link equity is a certain value or acknowledgement that a link from one web resource passes to another web page. But the most important thing is that search engines base their evaluation of the linked resource by the amount of link juice they receive from other pages.
When we say the ‘amount’ of link juice, we do not mean that it can be counted or even has a certain unit of measurement. It’s more complicated than that. Link equity is based on the domain authority of the page that passes it. So, we can say that the higher domain value pages are that link to your page, the more link juice it receives. As a result, its own domain authority grows as well.
Alternatively, think of it this way. One of the major goals of any SEO activity is to get more link juice flowing to your page.
Of course, the quantity of link juice is not the only factor that gets your resource a higher SERP place, but it plays a very significant role. Let’s delve into the details of how link juice impacts the SEO efforts and overall health of a website.
A Bit or History
The idea of link equity was introduced by Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergei Brin back when they were PhD students at Stanford. In 1998 they published a paper about page ranking called “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”. It essentially laid out a foundation for what was to become Google’s ranking algorithm.
The term Link Juice itself appeared later, when SEO specialists sought to explain the concept of passing authority from one site to another as it was seen by PageRank. The phrase caught on and has since become ubiquitous in SEO discourse.
Defining Link Juice
Today, link juice still determines the value of equity passed from one website to another through a placement of a hyperlink. Even though today’s version of Google’s page ranking algorithm includes dozens of criteria, general consensus is that link juice is one of the most important.
In Google’s calculations, each link is seen as a vote of confidence and a form of endorsement. If the link source itself has a lot of authority, its voice has more weight. Thus, a link from a source like national media or Wikipedia or a leading industry expert blog carries a lot more link juice than a reddit comment.
So, in a way, the quantity of link juice defines the link quality. According to the majority of SEO experts, link quality is more important:
What does Link Equity Do for your SEO?
In a very general sense, link juice is how the Internet on the whole and your customers in particular are seeing and discussing your resource, your content, your brand and what you are marketing. As a SEO marketer, your task is to make your site visible, accessible, favorably received and having a solid weight in your niche. Link juice reflects all of that.
- Increase your PageRank score
The most obvious thing. Google’s PageRank calculation mechanics use link equity as one of the significant PageRank factors. Pages with higher passed link equity tend to produce higher SERP results. That is why generating a bigger flow of link juice is among the goals of any SEO marketing campaigns.
- Authority and Expertise
When someone is calling for an exemplary representative of your niche, it’s always nice to hear your brand name as the answer. Being considered an expert in your field or a paragon of quality in your niche is no easy feat to achieve and the one that does wonders for your publicity and PR. Higher amounts of link juice usually mean that people cite you often and willingly whenever your domain is being discussed. Even if some of the citations (or many of them), are artificially crafted, they still work to make your brand name heard more often.
- Organic Traffic Increase
Being cited often and relevantly always means people will be generally in the know about you and your brand
- Better Visibility
If your link juice comes from veritable, high-authority pages, even a single link can boost your visibility greatly and improve your SERP results. Maintaining a good number of high-authority backlinks is one of the best SEO tactics still.
- Domain Authority
Having your resource’s domain authority rise is a coveted SEO achievement and it is also something a good amount of link juice can do for you. Let’s not forget that link juice can be external as well as internal. If your main page has a good domain authority rate, linking from it to your new pieces of content will be extremely beneficial for their separate ratings. To say nothing of the fact that it will be free for you.
- Faster Crawling and Indexing
Pages with a good amount of link juice get indexed and crawled faster and more often, so improving your link juice values will have Google re-visit your site and re-think your SERP results faster. And time is of matter in SEO as we all know.
5 Ways To Increase Link Juice
The only factor that affects the amount of link juice that you can’t directly influence is the Domain Authority of the link source. So, it’s wise to say that you can start with selecting higher-ranking sources. However, regardless of the linking page’s authority, there are things you can do to increase the amount of equity passed:
- Create High-Quality, Relevant Content
If the same source links to two pages where in one case the content is unique, more engaging and relevant, it will receive more link juice.
- Use Well-crafted Anchor Text System
Make sure you use proper Anchor Text ratios and types, diverse texts and avoid overoptimization. Even if you’re being linked from a source with high DA, but the anchor text is repetitive and exact-match, it can greatly decrease the potential amount of link juice you can receive.
- Create Guest Blog Posts
Since the context where your link is placed also affects the amount of equity passed, you can take it into your own hands. Guest blogging is a fine way to ensure both the relevance between the linked page and the source and the quality of source content.
Serpzilla is a perfect platform to start a guest blogging campaign, with its powerful guest posting and outreach automation features.
- Implement Strategic Internal Linking
Internal links also pass link juice! So, if one of your pages receives a lot more love in the form of backlinks than others, you can share it by installing a clever network of internal links. It is also a great chance for you to cover keywords that you have trouble otherwise ranking for and to highlight rarely visited pages.
- Opt for Cumulative Effect
When it comes to link juice, 1 + 1 can easily equal 4 or even 10. Meaning that several good backlinks to the same page together pass more link juice than each of them separately. When Google sees that several good sources link to you using varying anchor texts, with high relevance, it views it as extra confirmation for your content quality in response to a query and gives extra points just for that.
So, How Do I Increase Link Juice that Flows to My Pages?
Here are some practical things you can do to extract more link juice from your backlinks:
- Create Quality Content
Content marketing is the best way to develop organic, freely given backlinks that people share just because they like you.
- Guest Blogging
Guest posting has a good combo for producing nice quantities of link juice: it’s usually high-quality, user generated content on a page with a good domain authority.
- Fix 404 Links
Broken links can stall the flow of link juice to your site. You should always monitor your backlink profile for broken links and fix them ASAP.
- Optimize Internal Linking
In a perfect SEO world, link juice should be distributed between all pages of your website equally, but it’s usually not the case. Still, you should see to it that all the link juice of your website isn’t concentrated only on the main page, and internal links boost some more obscure corners of your resource.
- Maintain a Diverse Backlink Profile
Use as many link types as you can. Aim for a good combination of dofollow and nofollow links, several link source types, user generated content and regular content.
- Reclaim Lost Links
If you see a page that links to a similar content you have which no longer exists, you can reclaim it and take the link juice it gives for your own.
- Avoid Link Dilution
A web page with too many outbound links will tend to give less juice, even if its domain authority is high. Sometimes, the quantity of backlinks is so big, the amount of juice each receives is negligible.
- Use Social Media
User generated content galore, that’s what social media is SEO-wise. It also gives you a great opportunity to promote your content and generate organic backlinks.
- Reclaim Expired Links
Sometimes, websites will remove a link to you after a time for a number of reasons. Try to reach out and have your link reinstated, monitor for missing backlinks regularly, preferably, with specific backlink monitoring tools.
- Avoid Spammy Backlinks
If you’ve read this far, you already know that buying spammy backlinks in bundles does more harm than good because they seldom provide the relevance and the domain authority you want. Rather sooner than later Google discovers such schemes and penalizes them.
Monitoring your Backlinks for Link Juice: How To
Here is a list of good tools that will help you check the link equity that is being passed to your pages at any given moment of time.
- Google Search Console: This is a neat free tool. It will not measure your link juice per se, but it will give you a good layout of who’s linking to your site. You will be able to extract a lot of data about potential link juice from that information.
- Moz’s Link Explorer: One of the most popular SEO tools out there. Its “Domain Authority” (DA) and “Page Authority” (PA) metrics can give a good estimate about how much link juice you’re getting.
- SEMrush: Another industry favorite, SEMrush additionally allows users to view the authority score of referring domains. This will also give you a good picture about the link equity being passed to you.
- Ahrefs: A great and popular backlink monitoring tool, it has many metrics that will help you get a very comprehensive idea of your link juice quantity and quality.
- Majestic SEO: Its “Citation Flow” and “Trust Flow” metrics do not measure the link juice directly, but give a clear indication of the quality of your backlinks which in turn helps you to understand how much link juice is passed.
- Checking Nofollow Attributes: Nofollows don’t pass link juice, so checking for them can help you understand if a backlink is only working for visibility and recognition.
- Inspecting Redirects: Using tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider, you can identify redirect chains. Abusing redirects can decrease the amount of link juice passed.
- Link Juice Calculator Tools: An important note here. Like we said in the very beginning, link juice doesn’t have its own metrics or measure units so it can’t be measured directly. If you see someone claiming they can do this, there’s a good probability it is a scam.
Conclusion
When it comes to SEO, link juice is the lifeblood of internet visibility and influence. Through strategic hyperlink placements, quality content, and engagement, this valuable asset empowers web pages to rank higher for targeted keywords.
The principles behind Link Juice were laid down when SEO was just starting out as a science it is now, and they still dictate the ebb and flow of web traffic and the dynamics of online authority.
Understanding how link juice works and following the best practices described here will help you to improve your SEO – and your online influence.
