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.
