Link equity or link juice, defines the manner in which a link can pass authority or value from one page to another within a single website or between multiple sites.

Google & other search engines scan these links that pass equity to determine a page’s rankings in the SERPs.

Link Juice and PageRank

If a page or domain with a high authority includes a “followed link” to a smaller site’s article, it passes a certain amount of authority via that “followed link”. 

Hence, to some extent, link equity or link juice can be understood as the flow of a page’s ranking power from one link to another. 

How is link equity determined?

The value of the link juice or link equity is dependent on a number of factors, such as the linking page or domain’s authority and topical relevance. Listed below are a few important points to take into consideration when determining whether a link will pass equity or not:

• Is the link follow or no-follow? No-follow links signal to crawlers that they should be ignored and thus won’t have any link equity value.
• The links should be crawlable by the search engine bots.
• Location of the link on the page: Links buried in the footer or in a sidebar aren’t given as much importance as compared to links in the body of the page. 
• Number of links on the page: There’s no hard-and-fast rule about the optimal number of links on a page. But if the link to your site is lost among many hundreds or thousands of other links, the user may not find it. This decreases its value. 
• Links that point to a 302 redirect before landing on your website are a big NO!

• Links from unique domains are more significant than links from sites that have linked to you before.
• Links using relevant anchor text pass more keyword focussed value.