In SEO, link juice is referred to the value or equity a web page or a website receives from another. This value is done by implementing hyperlinks. As true in link building, search engines recognise these links as a vote of confidence that your page and the linked content is worthy of promotion hence ranking it higher on the search engine result page. So, link juice is just a slang to describe the amount of power your website receives when building backlinks.
There are many strategies to earn link juice from other websites, both with direct and indirect tactics. Direct methods include link building strategies like guest posts, sharing infographics, social media marketing and more. However, if you want to receive link juice indirectly, you need to publish the best content related to your niche online, and other websites link to them. The link juice and its Authority that passes through these methods are dependent on the Authority and Authenticity of the source website.
How link juice works?
Every web page online has a number of links to other pages. These links are divided into two categories, internal links and external links. Internal links are the type of links that refer to the same website domain, and external links point to other websites. Each of these links has a certain value that not only can affect the destination page but also every other page that links to it.
Link juice in SEO is not the only linking factor, but it is widely considered one of the major ranking strategies. It is also worth mentioning that link juice can be distributed throughout your website with the help of internal linking. When one of your articles get picked up by the algorithm, other websites will link to it because it has value. The next logical step would be linking that very same page in your other articles whenever it’s possible to share the link juice throughout your website. So, it is understandable that with good links, you can get more juice and direct it back to your website.
How do I get link juice?
Link juice is the reward you receive from link building. There are multiple direct and indirect ways to get more backlinks and increase the amount of link juice you get. These strategies will make you rank higher on Google, which would lead to your content being recognised by other websites and hence linked to.
- Create great informative content about your niche and thrive to become the first result showing on the search engine result page.
- Try to convey that your website and blog can be a trustworthy resource
- Write articles for other websites in your own niche. (Guest posting)
- Expand your connections with like-minded people on social media or by joining communities.
- Try to get Quoted on another website to increase public relations.
How do you measure link juice?
The amount of link juice or link equity you’ll receive is highly relative and dependent on a number of factors.
- The HTML of your link
- The Authority of the website linking to your content
- The anchor text
- The relevance between the topic and your link
Do no-follow links have link juice?
When Google first released the Penguin algorithm, they wanted to weed out people who would pay for links and come up with a way to identify a legitimate connection between the two websites. That is when Google announced the no-follow tag.
A no-follow link’s purpose is to let the bots know not to follow or go to that link destination. The goal of this tag is to let search engines know that the website can’t approve if the source of the link is trustworthy or not. Later in 2019, Google also introduced two other tags, sponsored and UGC. The sponsored tag is to indicate that the webmaster had received payments for the link insertion, and UGC is user-generated content. Some have speculated that by introducing these new tags, Google wants to take some link juice from the no-follow links, but this never was confirmed.
In the case of do-follow links, things are entirely different. It is a legitimate link that lets the bots know they can go to the source link because it is trusted by them. Dofollow links are the smoothest way to receive that lucrative link juice we all after.
Since Google can’t easily be fooled, they have rolled out a final Pinguin algorithm update that can understand if a do-follow link is spammy or not. So don’t get excited about those do-follow links you get from an unrelated website because Google will know instantly that your link is just spam, so there is no link juice for you.
Internal and external link juice
- Any linking power a website receives from another domain is called external link juice
- Internal linking juice is distributed between subpages of a domain through internal linking
It is crucial to know how many internal links are generated on a site. The amount of link juice is directly related to that number. So the more internal links you have on your website, the less link juice is distributed per link. So, for a better SEO practice, you should first follow an internal linking strategy that prioritises your most important pages.
Factors that influence link juice
There are several strategies a website can follow to improve organic traffic with link juice and what sort of mistakes to also avoid during that process.
404 Errors
Each day you post a new blog on your website, you add a new link to your website. The number of new links will expand with time, and managing all these links can become difficult. If you delete one of those blogs for some reason, you also have to make sure to delete any other internal or external links that lead to that page.
If those redirecting links are not deleted, a 404 error will be shown to the user. One of the major disadvantages of 404 pages is that despite the page is empty, it still receives the amount of link juice it is supposed to get from the source website.
Duplicate content
One SEO mistake you can make on your website is publishing duplicate content on several pages. Search engines will choose one of those pages to rank in the search results, and typically, the choice is made automatically.
Sometimes we can not avoid having similar or duplicate content on our website. One way to solve this problem is by choosing one of those pages to be indexed. To do that, you need to set that page as a canonical URL.
Disavow
Link equity is like a double-edged sword. Your website might receive link equity from authority sites, but you might also get poor backlinks from spammy websites.
Search engines are pretty good at distinguishing those spammy websites from the good ones. However, sometimes your website can get a bad reputation just because those websites link back to you in the eyes of search engines. To fix that, in Google console, you can reject those damaging links with a tool called disavow links.
Conclusion
To receive all the benefits of link juice, a website can follow several strategies. Getting links from authoritative sites, implementing good internal linking techniques can lead to good ranking results on the search engine result pages. To reap all the benefits of link equity, you need to understand some of the major SEO concepts like do-follow or no-follow links, as we explained above, or internal or external linking power and how the link juice is distributed among the pages.
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