What is link juice in SEO:
Link juice is a term used to describe the value of links. A number of factors are considered when evaluating the worth of a link. The most important factor in determining the value of a link is its authority.
Authority can be defined as how reputable or established an individual or company might be on the web. Links from reputable sites will hold more weight than those from less-established sites.
Other factors that contribute to the authority of a site include:
- how old the site is;
- how often new content appears;
- what sort of content the site has;
- what types of other sites it has links with (sites linking to each other); and
- if the domain name is highly competitive.
In order to get these high quality links, SEO specialists need to use techniques like creating high quality content for their own website and establishing relationships with bloggers.
Some bloggers may want monetary compensation for linking back. In some cases this may work well for business owners, but should not be relied upon exclusively as it’s very difficult to predict the future of blogger interest in any particular site and blog posts go out of style quickly.
What is page rank?
Page rank is the power of Google’s algorithm to determine how relevant your website is based on other pages linked to your website. The higher the page rank, the more relevant your website appears in search engine results.
But how exactly does Google know what constitutes link juice and how can you ensure that your website has high-quality link juice? Keep reading to learn more about this topic!
How to get link juice?
The more quality backlinks a site has, the higher its authority. When search engines rank websites for a query, they take into account not only the content of those websites but also their authority as evaluated by counting their backlinks.
This way, popular sites with many backlinks may rank higher than those with fewer or no backlinks.
So if you want your website to rank higher on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), you should try to acquire as many backlinks from authoritative websites as possible.
One great place to find potential sources of these links is at directories like Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, or BOTW. It’s important to keep in mind that when an external website links back to yours, they are passing along some of their link juice to you.
The power of this effect varies depending on the type and strength of the incoming link—for example, a blog post pointing back to your website might have more value than someone linking just one time from their homepage.
Also, there is no set amount of link juice that will guarantee success; it all depends on the relative importance of other factors such as relevance to the topic being searched and quality of the content.
How Does Link Juice Work?
Link Juice refers to the value of a hyperlink that links back to your site. The more quality links you have pointing back to your website, the higher your site’s PageRank will be.
When Google indexes web pages, they look at the number of quality links pointing at a specific page as well as the quality of those linking sites. If a page has many high quality links coming from other respected domains, then that tells Google this site is important in its industry. Links from low-quality sites don’t have much power.
An analogy for this might be if I had two employees who worked equally hard but one was ranked first in the company and had been there for 30 years while the other just started two months ago. Who do you think should get paid more? The employee with less experience or the experienced employee?
It’s no contest; the experienced employee would get paid more because he or she brings more value to their work. The same goes for search engine ranking. In order to rank highly in search engines, you need good content along with plenty of links pointing back to your website which signals credibility and importance. The greater the number of quality links you have, the higher your PageRank will be.
Let’s know through an example!
Suppose you have two websites — A and B and all other ranking factors are constant for both websites. Now let’s suppose that site A has one backlink while site B has no backlink, then site A will tend to rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs) due to the link juice site A receives from external site linking to it.
Now; have a look at the diagram below.
Suppose site A receives backlinks from four external websites while site B receives backlinks from three sites and all the linking websites receive link juice from other websites too.
Since site A receives backlinks from more sites, there is more link juice being transferred to site A. In this case, site A is likely to rank higher than site B in search results.
Here; it is important to note that these results assume the sites linking to site A and site B have the similar authority.
If a page has three outbound links or let’s say you have a website and you recently published a blog post on that particular website.
And you gave links (dofollow) to three external websites on that recently published page, then your website will pass link juice to these three external sites and it will be divided in 33% equally as shown in the below diagram.
How is link juice determined?
Both internal link and external links can pass link juice. There are number of factors when determining passing link equity or link juice:
- Is the link relevant? If you’re linking to a webpage about advanced search engine optimization tips from an article about how to make your skin glowing, the link is not relevant — and search engine like Google will know it. Links coming from irrelevant niches doesn’t provide much authority or value.
- Is the link followed? Remember that crawlers ignore nofollow links. These links don’t pass any link equity. However, just because a link is no-followed doesn’t mean that they aren’t having value. If you only have dofollow backlinks, it’s unnatural and Google may penalize your website because of this reason.
- Is the linking site authoritative? If you have links from trusted websites that have built-up their web authority will pass more link juice to your website rather than links from brand-new sites that are just starting out.
- Where is your link located on the page? Links located in the website footer or in a sidebar of a page doesn’t have enough weight as links in the page body.
- Is the link crawlable? If a page is blocked from the robots.txt file, the crawlers will ignore crawling this page and the link won’t pass any value.
- How many links are located on that particular page? If you have a link on the page that have hundreds or thousands other links, it may not pass much valuable.
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