Link Juice: Understanding distribution and better controlling internal signals
What is meant by link juice is how internal and external links pass on signals and where potential is lost.
The topic is especially important when rankings, trust or the evaluation of external signals are unclear. In practice, it is almost always worth looking at quality, context and risks instead of pure quantity values.
What is meant by link juice is how internal and external links pass on signals and where potential is lost. This wiki page arranges the topic practically and shows, When priority arises, which mistakes are often and how you derive concrete measures from them.
Example: An important category gets hardly any internal references
Guidebooks often link to the homepage, but hardly to the appropriate category. Check real source pages, link context, and destination addresses. A meaningful reference at the appropriate text section helps users and makes the relationship between the contents clearer.
“Link juice” is a simplistic model, not a directly measurable stock per link. Do not calculate guaranteed ranking points from this. Crawl accessibility, technical fit and understandable anchor texts are practically verifiable starting points.
Review of Link Juice
Until 2013, Google used PageRank, which linked the strength of a page directly to its ranking. Pages received a ranking between 1 and 10. Google, for example, always ranked between 9 and 10, Wikipedia, for example, between 7 and 8. Merely private blog posts came to 1 and sometimes to 0, large press portals often to values between 4 and 6. This meant that those who received a backlink from a page with a high PageRank inherited from it to some extent a part of their ranking and the associated trust (trust) of users in this page.
As of 2013, the PageRank went into the Hummingbird algorithm, but the mechanism still works in a similar way, although not so well measurable. However, anyone who runs offpage SEO should still make sure that they get backlinks from strong, trustworthy sites, which in turn rank well and enjoy a high reputation. Now it is the case that individual values such as the PageRank, a TrustRank or even an AuthorRank are relatively well measurable and have therefore become concrete evaluation factors for the quality of websites.
The quality of a link, on the other hand, is subject to several evaluation factors. There is a concept of so-called link strength that Greg Boser once introduced. This measures the quality of incoming links, but also their number and distribution on a website. The power of individual backlinks is embedded in this concept. Then, it will come back from the rank of the side. SERPs determined from which they come, from content, but also from metadata or even awards for the starting page.
Even the location of the starting page, from which a backlink comes, can play a role: Obviously, it is rated higher if it comes from the start page and not from a bottom page.
Can link juice be controlled?
Anyone who puts a lot of effort into OffPage SEO can control it. This is done, for example, by an optimizer with the help of Linkbaits receives very strong backlinks from sites with high trust. The webmaster offers strong pages in turn strong content to which they voluntarily link. This is an elaborate procedure, which we will discuss in another article (see ")"Linkbait’. However, the effort is worthwhile to get backlinks with high power, which really strengthen the OffPage SEO sustainably.