What is link juice?

Link juice, also known as authority transfer, is an SEO technique by which a site well positioned in Internet search engines transfers part of its “authority” or relevance to a site of lesser reach. With this, the latter improves its page rank and, therefore, its position in searches related to the content it offers.

how does link juice work?

To understand what link juice is, it is necessary to understand that Google ranks websites according to a number of criteria, among which are:

• number of links pointing to our site (backlinks)
• the relevance of the sites that produce these links

A link from a practically unknown site is not the same as a link from a site with thousands of followers and a high page rank. Getting good links is therefore among the priorities of many entrepreneurs, start-ups and even large companies that want to improve their search engine rankings.

An example to understand how link juice works

Interestingly, the more links there are between one page and another, the lower the transfer of authority. Let’s suppose we have two sites, A and B, with a page rank or page authority of 39 and 4 points, respectively. If page A places a link to page B, the latter will receive 39 points. But if it were to place 10 links, it would only transfer 10% of its page rank, i.e. 3.9 points.

Factors involved in link juice quality

Now, the example we have just given was somewhat simplified, since other factors come into play in the transfer of authority. This means that the values in the example would be somewhat different in reality.

Some of the main factors involved in the quality of link juice, in addition to the authority of the source page and the number of links, are:

• The location of the link on the source page. In other words, a link located in a banner or on the side of the page is not the same as a link located within an article. Google will prioritize the one inside the article.
• Anchortext. This is the text of the link. For example: the anchor text of <a href=’URL’>Most popular films</a> would be “Most popular films”. Google detects how natural the anchor texts of our links are, and whether or not they use keywords or variations of these.
• Contextual and thematic relevance. That is to say that the link is coherent with the content to which it points. The Google search engine will notice if we put a link to a page whose topic has nothing to do with the referenced article. Likewise, the thematic affinity between both pages is highly valued.

Internal vs. external link juice

As we saw at the beginning, link juice can take place between websites, pages and even domains. When it takes place between websites or domains, it is said to be external link juice, the usefulness of which we have already seen in the previous section. On the other hand, when the transfer of authority takes place between pages of the same site, it is called internal link juice. But, why do we want to transfer authority from one page to another within the same site?

Let’s say you have an online store with an internal blog, and it has many more visitors than the store. This could happen because your articles attract a lot of people who are not looking for a product, but to read about the topics you address. One solution is to make internal link juice, putting links in the blog that go directly to categories, product descriptions or other parts of the online store. But we could also do external link juice by getting some other blog or any other kind of better positioned website to link to our store.

At this point, we hope you understand what link juice is, how link juice works and what to do to make it part of your SEO strategy.

Related Posts