Link Juice Explained
I just received an email from a webmaster asking me what “link juice” was and where could he buy some. While it is possible to buy links, they are actually worthless if they don’t give your site any weight. He had heard of the term “link juice” when it was used by Matt Cutt, Google’s spam cop, in an interview with SEOMOZ. The truth is, it was Greg Boser whose site Web Guerrilla first started the new buzz word.
Personally I refer to the weight of a link as “Pass Through Ratio” and wrote about it in my post Website Linking Strategies: Overview Of Pass Through Ratios. The concepts are very similar. Link Juice refers to the quality or weight that any website can pass on to other sites through links. If you are looking at buying some links or setting up some multi-link deals, then you are going to want to take a hard look at where your links are going to be placed.
Link Juice Pass Through Ratio Rules
I agree that link juice is a hipper name than pass through ratio or PTR, so I will stay trendy and continue to use it for this post. Since this is a core part of my business I am not going to give away some of the more advanced tools I have to calculate link juice on a site, but these following rules will still serve you well:
- Know The Page - if your site will be linked to from anything other than a home page, make sure you know exactly which page your link will be on. Some of the more shady link brokers won’t tell you exactly which page your link will be on, until you have already paid. This is a bad sign. All good brokers show you in advance where your link will be.
- No More Than 100 TOTAL Outbound Links - the page linking to you should not have more than 100 TOTAL links including internal navigation and other site control links.
- No More Than 25 Paid or Sponsored Links - make sure they don’t have a ton of paid or sponsored links. Really 16 is my rule of thumb for paid links, but enough industry people agree on 25, but the less the better.
- No More Than 2 Google Adwords Boxes - any site that has more than 2 Adwords boxes will not help you.
- At least 1 Point Higher In Page Rank - the site should have at least a 3 PR, as well as being higher than your page. Sites that have below 3 PR have little or no pass through.
These are basic guidelines for accepting inbound links. The thing to remember is; your own internal pass through, or link juice, also depends on your site following the basic rules of linking. Don’t have more than a couple advertisements, no more than 100 total links on a page, etc. By properly stuffing keywords and creating optimized content your pages will have more weight, which will in turn make your internal links have more go juice.
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thanks for explaining me about link juice. I was working on it but not knowing this.
+5, thank has heard much new and useful!
thanks for explanation, i also wondering about Matt Cutt saying on his blog.
Nice article on Link Juice!!
Link juice does wonderful things for a website. And if you’re buying it, make sure you get the concentrated form because it could help to increase your search engine ranking and enhanced the link juice of your site too.
Can you provide us information on any link juice tools available that will put a value on page links?
Thanks for the article.