How Does Link Juice Work?
Suppose you have sites A and B. If all other ranking factors are constant and site A has one link while site B has no links, site A will rank higher in search results due to the link juice it receives from the external site linking to it. What happens if site B also gains one link? This depends on the amount of juice each link passes. Look at the diagram below. Site A receives links from four sites while B receives links from two sites. All the linking sites receive link juice from other sites too. Since A receives links from more sites, there is more link juice being transferred to A and consequently, A is likely to rank higher than B in search results. Note: These results assume the sites linking to A and B have a similar authority.
Another factor to consider is that passing link juice happens in both directions. So, now let us say that the sites linking to site A all also link to other sites too (represented by the grey arrows in the diagram below), whereas the sites linking to site B exclusively link to B. In this case, the percentage of link juice that B receives is higher than the percentage of link juice site A receives. This increases site B’s chance at ranking higher than site A.
Sculpting link juice
You used to be able to use nofollow links to preserve the loss of link juice through outbound links. This process was known as PageRank sculpting. This was to manipulate the way link juice moved from the page.
In the first diagram, you will see that with dofollow links (links that are not nofollowed) the transfer of link juice is equally distributed to all the outgoing links from a website.
PageRank sculpting was possible when a webmaster added a nofollow attribute to one of the outgoing links, which meant that the link juice would not transfer to the page that is nofollowed but would be distributed to the other links. This is demonstrated in the diagram below.
This is no longer possible. You can see in the next diagram that the site distributes its link juice to all three sites equally, the difference is that the nofollowed link doesn't receive it.
Since this is the case, you may be worried about the dilution or leaking of link juice from your home page to nofollow links on your footer or sidebar. A good and widely used practice is to stop the flow of link juice to spam comments and links posted on blogs with a nofollow attribute. On the contrary, when it comes to internal links on a site, it is a good practice to allow a natural flow of link juice rather than controlling it with nofollow attributes. The link juice obtained and distributed within your site keeps your inner pages popular on the web as well as your homepage. This collectively enhances the PageRank of your home page.
Link juice comes from:
- Pages that have content relevant to your site.
- Pages that have a high PageRank.
- Pages that have relatively few outbound links.
- Pages that contain quality content.
- Pages that appear high in SERPs.
- Pages that have user-generated content.
- Pages that are popular with social media audiences, i.e. they are mentioned often in social media.
Link juice doesn't come from:
- Pages that have nofollowed the link to your site.
- Pages with irrelevant content.
- Pages that have a lot of links; for example, ad links or site-wide links.
- Pages that are not indexed in search.
- Paid links.
- Links obtained in a link exchange scheme. (This is where you link to someone’s site in return for a link to your site, which essentially cancels the impact.)
- Links from unranked sites with no content.
How Pages Get More Link Juice
Internal Linking
One often-overlooked source of potential link juice is your site. In a relentless pursuit of high-value backlinks, many marketers miss pools of link juice concentrated on their most popular pages. Chances are, you’ve got a reservoir of value you can pass on to your internal pages, waiting for you to tap into through internal linking.
As with most on-page SEO elements, internal linking starts with your keyword research (if you need help, there are plenty of
free tools out there). Come up with a list of a few keywords you want to target for your page. Find pages on your site that feature those keywords using the site: and intext: operators to get the pages that have the most value to pass. For example, search site:
www.example.com intext:"target keyword”. Narrow this list down to a few high priority pages with high authority. There are a few tools you can use:
SEO Review Tools: This is a robust tool that finds both domain and page authority for a URL. It will also tell you the total number of external links pointing at your page. Use the Link Checker tool to find the URL, anchor text and authority information for your external links. They also have a bulk
authority checker that lets you look up ten pages at a time.
Small SEO Tools: A free tool that scores domain and page authority of submitted URLs out of 100.
Open Site Explorer: This is a free tool by SEOmoz. You can get Moz’s Domain Authority, Page Authority and inbound links for your page.
When you’ve assembled your lists of target keywords and high authority pages, it’s time to drain the link juice. Place links to your target page using your keywords as anchor text. Be careful to avoid hyperlinking only your keyword exact matches as this could end up looking spammy to a search engine. Use synonyms or
latent semantic keywords (LSI keywords) when possible.
Finally, you need to remove any unnecessary outbound links from your pages. As we mentioned above, the amount of value a page can pass is divided equally among the total number of links on a page. You can use the rel="nofollow” tag to avoid passing link juice, but you can’t use it to increase the amount of equity passed by other links on the page. You can find the number of internal links on a page in
Google Search Console under Search Traffic.
How to Maximize Your Link Juice
Since link juice is so important to a page's search ranking, optimizing your website's link juice is an integral part of SEO. This comes in two parts:
- Maximizing your existing link juice
- Acquiring more link juice
Internal linking
Many marketers and website owners overlook pools of link juice already acquired by pages. There's an excellent chance you've got reservoirs of link juice on your site that are just waiting to be tapped to distribute value to other pages.
To optimize your internal linking for a particular page, come up with a list of keywords and LSI keywords relevant to the page's content and other pages relevant to that content. You can use the site: and intext: search operators to find that content.
Add links to your target page in the top pages in those search results (obviously, ignore any pages that aren't actually relevant). It might be tempting, but don't use the same keyword-rich anchor text every time. This could wind up looking spammy to Google.
Consider removing less relevant links from those high-value pages to avoid diluting the link juice too much.
Check My Links is a super useful plugin to find the links on a page. #seo
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