What Is Link Juice?

Link building: It's a high-risk, high-reward practice. If you do it right, you can reap the rewards. Mess it up, however, and you could be looking at a punishment from the search engines.

This guide will provide you with a comprehensive and definitive guide to all things link equity-related, including addressing what precisely it is, how it can help your website and how to get more of it.

The Fundamentals Of Link Juice

Link juice is a term commonly associated with SEO, or search engine optimization, to the uninitiated.

But what exactly is link juice?

Link juice, in simple terms, refers to the amount of value or authority that a particular backlink passes to the website it is connecting with.

Also known as link equity, link juice is an important consideration for anyone who wants to make their website more appealing and trustworthy to Google, alongside the other various search engine overlords like Bing and Yahoo.

Backlinks that come from websites with higher authority and have relevance to a topic or niche will generate more link juice and, therefore, help a page to rank better on the SERP.

Although there are several key factors that are involved in calculating a web page's authority, link juice through strong backlinks is merely one of them. But it's a very important one and certainly not an SEO practice that you can afford to overlook.

Link juice should not be confused with PageRank, yet it often is. PageRank is Google's actual calculation of how authoritative a page is. (FYI: According to Google, PageRank has been terminated, there are a lot of SEOs out there confident that Google is still using something very similar, which will evaluate a page's value which then influences how it ranks.)

Link juice, on the other hand, involves the "value" of how a web page's PageRank is moved via each backlink.

Not all links are able to generate link equity. Those websites big in the authority stakes are deemed as trustworthy, and so their links are able to pass on more link juice. Similarly, those whose authority won't break the internet anytime soon and, therefore, lack heavily in link juice.

How Do I Get More Link Juice?

How can you earn more backlinks which will lead to link juice? There are a number of ways:

• Ensure your content is authoritative and become experts in your niche for definitive information on your subject
• Position your site as a valuable resource
• Create guest posts for other sites in your industry
• Create partnerships and become part of industry groups
• Using finely tuned PR campaigns, get mentions on other websites

Factors That Influence Link Juice

The following factors directly influence link equity; let's take a look at them.

Nofollow links

While at one time, the links with a nofollow tag were ignored by search engines, recently, they started to be considered when the link juice is distributed. However, this is at a limited level.

Number of links

While the quality and relevance of links are vital, the number of links is also a valuable factor.

Anchor text

Anchor text is great for a link juice strategy. When the keywords are found in the anchor text, Google thinks of it in terms of search intentions, which will bring it higher up the rankings on the results page.

404 Errors

When a website grows, there are going to be a lot of internal links and external links to deal with. There will be lots of links connected to each other. Yet, if you decide to delete a page, you need to remember that you need to remove any links on your website that link back to that page as well.

If this isn't carried out, an online user who attempts to click on the link will be faced with a 404 error, and that's never fun.

For as long as the link remains, there will be at least link juice from the original source page that is still sent to the 404 error page. This is considered a complete waste of link equity that could be easily redistributed.

Duplicate content

If you have similar content on different web pages, Google very often will decide that these are simply duplicate pages. Therefore, Google will choose to only show one of the pages in the SERP.

Disavow

While it's great to get incoming links from a high-ranking, authoritative web page, there's also the likelihood that you could be faced with backlinks from spam websites.

Search engines mostly have no problem distinguishing between a link that's trustworthy and a spam link which is considered a bit suspect. If it doesn't happen that a search engine will recognize the difference, a spam link has the potential to diminish your website's authority.

If this happens - thankfully, it's quite rare - you can reject these incoming links through the disavow link from Google.

Let Link City Level Up Your Link Building

Getting link juice isn't always straightforward; you need the time and energy to carry it out correctly. And, if you don't know what you are doing, not only will you not gain invaluable link juice, but you could also potentially cause damage to your website.

At Link City, we get the very best visible and measurable results for our clients. Honed with years of hands-on SEO experience, knowledge and know-how, we can transform your website authority and rank faster than you might think.

Here are just some reasons why you should speak to us today:

Expertise

Did we mention we are experts in our field? We have the skill set to make your website visible to all forms of intended traffic as we craft it to scale the SERPs.

Quality Backlinks

We use only the best high-quality backlinks. We will only ever make contact with websites that have both high authority and sound metrics.

Communication

We want to make you a part of the process. You will be kept up-to-date every step of the way, and we'll even provide you with one of our dedicated, professional accounts managers who will be on hand whenever you need them.

We get results

Our clients see results when they choose us to work with them. And these results speak for themselves. Just check out our Trust Pilot reviews for yourself and see!

FAQs

What are good quality backlinks?

The sign of a good quality backlink is it's relevant and related to the niche in question. Authority and traffic are also signs of a healthy backlink that will be viewed favorably by the likes of Google.

Why are bad-quality backlinks bad for a business?

If a business website has a large number of spam links, it's bad for the overall health of the domain in the eyes of the search engine. The likes of Google can penalize you for this, so it's important to get high-quality external links pointing to your website.

What is a spam backlink?

A spam link is a very low-quality backlink from a spam domain. A spam score is used by some search engines to measure the value of a website in terms of the number of incoming backlinks from spam websites.

Can I pass link juice using internal links?

Yes, you can gain link juice via internal links from your own website. It's an effective way to move more authority and spread it across your website or blog. When you run internal links to relevant pages on your website, these pages also get link juice from your authority pages.

Yet, in order to get the very most out of using internal links, you need to pay special attention to your content. It's important to find existing articles that use some of the keywords for your link. Most importantly, internal linking should look natural - always.