Link Juice in SEO – An Important SEO Strategy

Link Juice is an important SEO factor for ranking your website within Google search results. I have seen many bloggers overlooking the power of this factor which results in wasted link juice. If you ask SEO experts, how can we use links to improve search engine rankings, they will definitely put emphasis on this factor too.  If you do not know about this, then this article is for you. In this article, I will be discussing what is link juice and how you can increase it (or page authority). So, are you excited to know about this? Let’s proceed to this article without wasting any time.

What is SEO Link Juice?

Link Juice is the amount of positive ranking factor that a link passes from one page to the next. As you know, every web page has its own authority and, ranking factors, and other various metrics. The link metrics of any given web page determines how much link juice it can pass to other web pages. In simple words, link juice definition is the authority passed to a website via a number of external and internal links pointing back to a website and its inner pages. It is a well-known fact that Google and other search tools give too much importance to the quality of links. Hence, a link from a well-known blog that is trusted by the search engines will pass more “juice” than one on a pointless directory. Thus, it is equity passed to a site that is considered as a recommendation vote toward your site. On a higher note, link juice, link equity, backlink authority, or link authority mean essentially the same thing despite having different words.

Also Read: Link Whisper Reviews

How Does Link Juice Work?

Now the obvious question that comes to mind is – how does it work or how to calculate link juice? As mentioned earlier, it depends on the number of internal and external links pointing to your blog. Let’s say we have two websites – A &B. I am taking a hypothetical situation where all the metrics and ranking factors of both the sites are the same. The only difference between them is a number of links pointing to them. Consider website A has 10 backlinks (i.e. inbound links) and website B is a new site and does not have any backlink yet. Now, in this case, website A will rank higher in search engines. But now you might ask what if website B also gains 10 backlinks, then who will rank higher. The answer is it depends on how much juice each link passes.

Also Read: How to Monitor You Backlinks Using SEMrush

Below are some link juice examples and case studies –

Case 1: Number of External Links Pointing To Sites

Below is an image from woorank, which clearly depicts how link juice flows. In this blog, A receives links from four blogs while B receives links from two blogs. A receives links from more blogs, there is more juice being transferred to A and consequently, A is likely to rank higher than B in search results.

Note: However there is a catch in this too. We are saying A will rank higher than B, assuming that the sites linking to A and B have similar authority and trust.

Image Source: WooRank

Case 2: Number of External Links Pointing Exclusively To Sites

There are other factors too which play an important role in link juice. Let’s take another example. There might be chances that sites linking to website A also link to other sites too. But on the other hand, sites linking to website B exclusively link to only B and no other sites. In this case, the percentage of juice that website B is receiving is more than the percentage of juice website A is receiving. It means that there are higher chances that website B will rank higher than website A.

Image source: woorank

Case 3: Understanding Flow With DoFollow & NoFollow Links

Generally, in the case of doFollow links, the link juice is equally distributed to all the outgoing links from a website. For example, If a website has 5 outbound links (all doFollow) to external sites, each outbound link will carry 20% ( Site A –> Site E) E.g.

Now, what if any of the links is NoFollow? Does nofollow pass link juice? The answer is, the juice is passed the “normal” way no matter whether you use a Nofollow or not. You can see in the next diagram that the site distributes its juice to all five sites equally, the only difference is that the Nofollow link does not receive it.

How Do I Check Link Juice?

You can check it on Moz’s Internal Link Juice Tool. You need to enter your blog’s URL and PageRank of the page. This tool will crawl the number of links on the page. It will calculate the total amount of PageRank link juice the page has to distribute and show how much link juice each link is passing.

How To Improve Link Juice Of Your Website?

Ideally, it should be spread evenly throughout a website. Do not concentrate all your juice on links to your homepage. Try to get deeper links to your different pages. You can use the online link juice calculator (free) to check this.

Below are the useful tips to increase it on your blog.

• Including a Sitemap On Your Homepage

A sitemap is a very good way to showcase all your posts not only to the users but to the search engines also. A sitemap can be a hierarchical list of pages (with links) organized by topic, an organization chart, or an XML document that provides instructions to search engine crawlers. Here is a sitemap of catchupdates.com, you can have a look at it.

• Harnessing the power of Internal Linking

Internal linking also plays a very important factor here.  Internal links are nothing but the links that go from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain. You can improve the link juice of your website by interlinking pages of your website to one another. Now, since you know how the link juice flows, you should be more careful in linking to your internal pages. Say, you have three pages – a popular page P1 (popular page is a page having good page authority already which can pass good juice), a normal page N1, and a poor page PO1 (poor page is nothing but a web page not having good page authority). Now, you are linking P1 –> N1, then, N1 will get much juice from the P1. Similarly, if the poor page links to normal page PO1 –> N1, the normal page will not get much link juice since the poor page itself does not have much capacity.

Internal links not only help in diluting link flow but also help in improving the bounce rate of your blog. I would suggest creating at least three internal links to your other articles.

I recommend using LinkWhisper for managing your internal links. Check out Link Whisper WordPress Plugin Reviews

• Improving the External Juice

Link building is a very important aspect of search engine optimization strategy. I have seen many bloggers doing common link building mistakes. Similar to internal links, external links are also very important. You should concentrate on getting quality links (or backlinks) from other websites. Try to get links from quality and authority sites having a good trust flow & citation flow. These backlinks are the vote of recommendation which shows that your website has quality content that is useful for the readers. Search engines consider these factors in ranking your website in SERPs. You can also link to other sites that are similar to your niche and have the same content as yours.

• Avoid Concentrating Your Link Juice To Your Home Page Only

As mentioned earlier, many bloggers commit this mistake. They are trying to create links that are pointing to their home page only. Is it bad? No, it is not bad. It will help you to create good domain authority of your blog and rank higher in search results. But what will happen to other pages of your websites? So, it is very important to go for deeper links. Deeper links simply mean that rather than concentrating your links to one particular page, create a web of links throughout your website pages. If your website has a balanced link juice distribution, every page on the website will have a good chance of ranking well. So, the key point here to note is that take care of spreading it properly.

• Ignore Low-value Pages To Avoid Wasting

Low-value pages are nothing but the pages which do not provide many benefits in being found in higher search engine rankings. You might be thinking about low-value pages then. I am talking about various pages such as Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, or in some cases Contact Us and About Us pages too. Since these pages do not benefit much, they will simply waste the link juice (since it is distributed equally to all the linked website pages). We can suggest search crawlers not to pass any juice to them. So, how can we achieve this? We can make use of the robots.txt file to instruct search engine crawlers not to crawl and index these pages.

Few Other Important Tips To Improve Link Juice Flow

• Try to pass link juice from your high authority pages to low authority pages to have a good flow juice across your blog.
• Remove unnecessary links to prevent leaking link juice. Do not set unnecessary links as rel=”Nofollow” since we have seen that even NoFollow link consumes equal link juice distribution but there is no receiver to receive it (see Case 3). So, it results in wastage of valuable juice.
• Do not ask for links from a web page which already is linking to too many other pages. It will not pass good juice to your page (since it is equally distributed)
• Write unique and useful content (includes contributing content to other websites also)
• Try to get listed in niche related directories.

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That’s all in this article. Hope you would have liked it. Don’t Forget To Share It with your friends and subscribe to our email newsletter for more such updates. What tactics are you using to improve your link juice? Do share your comments in the section below.