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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. No More Than 2 Google Adwords Boxes – any site that has more than 2 Adwords boxes will not help you.
5. 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.

Website Linking Strategies: An Overview of Pass Through Ratio

Linking is the single most important part of search engine optimization. You might have built the most spectacular website in the world, but if no can get to it, or if users can’t find it in the search engines, it serves no purpose. Search Engine Optimization really boils down to 3 basics:

1. Keywords – identify the words that users will type into search engines to find your site.
2. Optimize - place your keywords within the domain, the URL’s and throughout the site’s content.
3. Link – list your site in directories and obtain links from other web sites. Have a good internal linking structure.

Internal Linking Strategies

The most important part of your website is your content, but how that content is accessible is just as crucial. If your users can’t readily find what they are looking for, then they will leave your site and never come back. Every site has some sort of navigation. Whether it is a fancy Flash menu system with rollover effects going across the header or simple text links running down the sidebar, you have to have navigation.

How your internal pages link together outside of the navigation or footer links is extremely important for SEO as well as usability. For now I am concerned with SEO, but if you are interested in linking for usability read: Website Usability Deep Link Navigation. The search engine spiders follow the links within your content as well as the links within your navigation and footer. In fact it is the content links that are of more importance, especially on the home page.

A website and its pages are broken down into tiers. The top tier pages are your home page and any pages that are linked directly from it. The second tier pages are linked from pages other than your home page. For instance if you have a link from your home page to your services page, and from services you link to the individual pages that explain your different offerings, those sub pages are second tier. Those pages that are not linked to the home page, but only to your service page are third tier pages. If you have sub-pages under the different individual services those would be fourth tier pages and so on.

The graphic below shows a 3 tier system and how Google Page Rank diminishes the further a page is linked from the home page. This demonstration is taking into consideration that the tier pages have the proper “Pass Through Ratio”.

Search engines, particularly Google prefer that pages are within the root directory. Many webmasters will make a separate sub folder called /services/ and put that categories pages within it to better organize the files on the web server. Unless your site is dynamic or you have thousands of pages you should keep your pages within the root. This is also important to the tier linking. Pages within the same directory have a much better chance of passing the Page Rank on to its sub pages.

Pass Through Ratio And Why Its So Important To Linking

The pass through ratio is broken down into 2 types:

1. Domain Pass Through – the carry over of page rank to pages linked from overall website elements such as footers and navigation.
2. Page Pass Through – the carry over of authority and page rank from one page (or tier) to another.

When you are first developing a website drawing out your site linking structure is one of the most overlooked facet of design. You must plan your internal linking carefully to not water down your top tier pages. Too many outbound links on a page (even internal links) will take away its authority and ability to score higher page rank.

More importantly, on an existing website, the addition of new pages and their ability to rank in search engines depends on pass through. Top tier pages that need to also support pages under them must have outside linking to them directly for them to be able to pass on their authority.

When obtaining inbound links whether you do reciprocal link exchange or buy links from a broker make sure to also get links for your internal pages. That is the most important aspect of pass through, the weight of the internal tier pages. My next article will go into detail about link gathering tactics.