What is link juice? how it’s calculated, and how does it work?

What is link juice?

Link Juice is a term in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that refers to the amount of authority or value that one backlink passes to the website it connects with.

In the SEO industry, link juice is also referred to as “link equity”.

Backlinks from websites with higher authority and relevance on a topic will generate more link juice and help a page rank better on the SERP (Search Engine Result Page).

In general, the more link juice your page has, the better chance it gets for your page to rank for targeted keywords on the search engine. There are also several other factors that are being used for page ranking. Link juice through backlinks is also an important piece of the puzzle.

Types of Link Juice:-

1. External Link Juice — It is the linking power that is passed on from one domain to another.

2. Internal Link Juice — It is the linking power that is being passed on by internal linking to other internal pages.

Link juice as an SEO influence factor

Within Search Engine Optimization (SEO) backlink profiles and TrustRank are amongst the most important factors when it comes to link equity, the amount of link equity is important for the link profile of a site.

The stronger the linking sites are in terms of their TrustRank, the more the link juice flows from them to the sites to which they are linking. Generally numerous links like — Do follow, No follow link go from one site to other sites.

How is link juice determined?

Both internal and external links can pass link juice. There are a few important considerations when it comes to determining whether a link will pass the juice.

• Is the link relevant or not? If you’re linking to a page about fixing your car or an article about how to bake grandma’s special cake, then the link is probably not relevant and the search engine will know. Links that are irrelevant may not provide much authority or value to that site.
• Is the linked site authoritative? Links from trusted websites that have built up their authority tend to pass more link juice than links from new sites.
• Is the link followed? No-follow links signal to crawlers that the link should be ignored. They won’t have link juice. However, just because a link is a no-follow link doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t have other values.
• Is the link crawlable or not? If a webmaster uses a robot.txt file on his page, the crawler is told to ignore it and the link won’t pass any value to the site.
• Where is the link located on the page? Links that can be buried on the footer of a page or in a sidebar aren’t given as much weight as the links in the body part of the page. The site’s architecture helps search engines determine what content is useful to most visitors. So look at this from the visitors’ perspective What is the visitor’s intent, when they are visiting the page, and how do the links help them achieve it?
• How many links are located on the page? If the link to your site is one of many hundreds or thousands, it may be as valuable, although there’s no hard and fast rule about the optimal number of links on a page.

How does Link juice works?

Google carefully evaluates all the links that link back to a specific website. Based on this Google determines the kind of ranking position it assigns to a particular webpage and places it in the search results for searched keywords on the search engine.

Let us explain how link juice works with the help of an example — Suppose you have websites A and B. Let’s say all other ranking factors are constant and site A has one link while site B has no linked site, site A will rank higher in search results due to the link juice it is receiving from the external site linking from it.

That’s why the higher number of pages that link to your website, and the higher the quality of those pages, the more link juice your webpage will receive and it will rank higher on Google.

How do website pages get more link equity?

The best way to get more links on your website:-

1. Create more authoritative, useful, and trustworthy content.
2. Improve the strength and popularity of your brand.
3. Continually advertise, promote, and PR (Paid Promotion).
4. Promote good website content and be sure it gets in front of the correct audience.
5. Contribute content to other websites.
6. Do influencer marketing.
7. Do product reviews on your blog.
8. Get listed in industry-relevant directories.

How do webmasters ensure link juice is in the right place?

It was used to be possible to deliberately use “Dofollow” and “Nofollow” attributes for PageRank sculpting. Whilst the entire link equity was funneled. to the important sites, the flow could simply be stopped for the less important sites.

In 2009, Google changed the interpretation of the “No follow” link in such a way that PageRank sculpting was no longer possible. That’s why it is important to ensure a sensible structure of the backlink profile, with the help of internal link equity, can be distributed among the sites so that important websites are being emphasized.

How do you calculate link juice?

There are multiple metrics available to calculate link equity of the websites — of your as well as others. The algorithm that is being used by Google to calculate link equity is Google PageRank.

However, Google PageRank data is no longer available to the public. So many SEO tools now publish their link equity data separately tools like Majestic Trust Flow and Majestic Citation Flow, Moz Domain Authority, etc. They are valuable and give you accurate results.

The link Juice Killer — Google Penguin update

In April 2012 Google rolled out the Penguin update, as a measure against the webspam, it is also called “webspam update” or “ bad SEO update”.

The main goal behind the update of this series of Google updates was to relegate unjustly ranking websites from the Google search results. Those who are engaged in doing keyword stuffing, link schemes or cloaking, etc. could expect their websites to be punished.

With its new webmasters guidelines, Google sets out clear rules that webmasters are to uphold for avoiding using spam measures and punishments.

With the introduction of the Penguin 1.0 update and the subsequent changes up to Penguin 4.0 in 2016. Links that were considered a real link recommendation before the update and passed on link juice, were being devalued and were even given a negative value.

In Germany, almost 3% of all search queries, particularly on Google’s first page, were affected by the invisible area of the update. What had previously still been a positive link then become a major source of danger for websites, which means the webmasters had to get rid of these dangerous links by link dismantling.

Therefore, nowadays it is really important that you keep a clean and natural link profile.