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: How To Get Inbound Links

Inbound links are the most important part of search engine optimization second only to keyword development and density of those keywords throughout URL’s, content and pages. You simply can’t have one without the other. All the keyword research and perfect optimization of those keywords throughout the site will amount to nothing without quality inbound links.

There are several types of inbound links and before we get into acquisition I am going to expand on the different types of links and how they effect your site.

The Different Types Of Inbound Links

The list below is broken down starting with the least powerful link to the most powerful link:

• Reciprocal Linking – The grand daddy of inbound linking, link swapping, which is basically: “I put a link on my site and you put a link on yours”, is out of date and has the least amount of weight. In fact there are some SEO experts now saying that reciprocal linking can actually hinder your placement. I am not sure I am willing to go that far, but they certainly don’t positively effect a site like they once did.
• Three Way Linking or Triangular Linking or Pyramid Linking – This scheme is a little better as far as weight goes, but I have been wary of it lately. With all the intelligence that goes into the algorithms of Google and Yahoo, I just can’t believe they can’t come up with a formula that can isolate Three Way Linking and filter it along with other spam tactics. The theory is simple and quite easy to implement when you or your link partners have multiple sites. Basically Site A links to Site B, which links to Site C which links back to Site A. Again there is no evidence that GoogleBot or Slurp have been tracking Triangular Linking, but I believe they do and will act on it, especially when abused. Another thing to worry about is the pass through ratio of ALL the corners of the Pyramid Linking foundation. If you don’t understand the pass through ratio check out my article: Website Linking Strategies: An Overview of Pass Through Ratios.
• One Way Inbound Links - This is a tricky, but highly effective means of boosting Page Rank as well as specific keyword optimization for a page. Link Baiting (Link Baiting has a bad reputation, but that is only because some tech writer used it in reference to those high-profile bloggers that tied “miserable failure” to George Bush’s profile page on whitehouse.gov, the fact is that trick was Link or Google Bombing, NOT link baiting!) is one of the most powerful ways to target your placement for a specific keyword. By obtaining several inbound links with the same exact phrase within the anchor text, you are effectively building authority for the site for that term. This tactic is especially effective when linking directly to the home page. If you are more interested in driving a tier 2 or tier 3 page up for a keyword, it requires more links. In fact if your trying to build authority for a tier 3 page, but the tier 2 page has weak pass through ratio, it will be much harder to obtain placement for the 3rd tier page. It important to understand that your websites linking structure both internally and externally are the foundation for your placement. You have to shore up the authority from your home page on down to your lowest page. A site that has many pages MUST employ Deep Link Navigation, not only from a usability standpoint, but from an SEO standpoint as well. No matter what your strategy, a one way link is nearly the most powerful type of inbound link. One key factor is the anchor text that links to your site should appear on the linking page. It is more about authority than it is relevance when looking at one way links. If you have any questions or need me to expand on this, leave a comment on this post.
• RSS Feed Link - By far the absolute strongest inbound link is when a website places your RSS feed on their site. If your feed is set up properly for optimization, your feed should have multiple attributes within the XML of the feed. The first attribute is “Publisher” this is the URL to your site that relates to the feed. For example if you have a blog, the home page would be the Publisher URL. If your blog is part of a larger domain, it is possible through XML-RPC to have dynamic feed content on your static home page. This would allow the actual home page of the main site to act as the publisher as opposed to just the home page of the blog. After “Publisher” comes the articles. Most sites will put up 5 articles from a site’s feed. They will obviously rotate as the feed gets updated. Here lies one of the problems with an RSS Link. If every time your feed updates then the search engine will be showing a different link since the URL’s of your stories are static. That is why it is imperative that you have the “Publisher” attribute in your feed. For more info read my RSS Syndication Overview. The bottom line here is that every time a site displays your RSS feed, your site’s authority doubles. The way to raise the authority for specific keywords is through the “Publisher Description” attribute. At this time I am not going to go over pingbacks, trackbacks and RPC as inbound links since that is going to be a 2 or 3 article series.

Inbound Link Gathering – How To Get Links

Looking at the above list about the differences between inbound links, I am going to spell out acquisition strategies in the same order. I don’t think I need to go into detail about reciprocal linking, since it is lame and doesn’t work anyway, but if you are hell bent on doing it, find related websites and send them an email with your information and where you put their link on your site. Back in the day I would do Link Extortion. In other words, I would put up 20 or 30 links on a page, build up its Page Rank, wait until Google was showing the links in the natural SERPS, i.e. link: www.domain.com, then send them an email with a link to Google’s page showing my inbound link to their website. I would point out to them that my link was already showing in Google and if they wanted to keep that link, they would need to reciprocate.

When acquiring links, the bottom line is you have to communicate with other website owners. The only other alternative is to purchase or rent links from a broker. This is another industry that has gotten a lot of bad publicity over the years. The fact is a good broker only places relative links. In other words the sites are somehow related. I only use 2 brokers. Text Link Ads, and Text Link Brokers. They both have outstanding inventory as well as common sense when it comes to SEO.

Another option for one way links is to use a service such as Review Me that puts together bloggers and advertisers. Basically you can either search for blogs that are related to your site and pay a one time fee to have a blogger either review your product or write about your site. They cost anywhere from $30 to $300 depending on the Page Rank of the blog. Make sure you research the blog. Make sure that articles that are 2 or 3 months old have the same or close to the same page rank. This is how you can gauge the pass through ratio of the blog.

Finally we get to RSS. Again this is a subject that will require 2 or 3 posts to cover, but here is the nuts and bolts. I use WordPress. WordPress is built for SEO and communication. It comes out of the box ready to communicate with search engines and RSS directories, but you still have to do a lot of work. There is a great service called pingomatic that notifies a slew of directories every time your blog (or if you are like me and have XML-RPC on your static pages as well) or site has been changed or an article has been added, or a comment has been made on an article.

Outside of this service there are a ton of news or RSS directories that you will have to manually “plant” both your blog/site and its feed. Once your blog and feed are planted, you will be able to plant your articles as well. It took me a whole month to get my blog, site, and feeds planted in the top 55 directories. I am now just starting to plant my articles, but already I have seen my inbound links within Google’s Webmaster Center, as well as Yahoo’s Site Explorer triple! Yep triple. I am not going to candy coat this. It is a lot of hard work, it took a lot of time, but my traffic has increased as has my search engine placement. I am now looking at a visibility index of 45% for the 125 keywords I track. Prior to implementing XML-RPC my index was around 22%.

My next article about linking is going to drill down into XML-RPC and how to employ it on more than just a blog. As always I welcome all questions, but I ask that they are put in as comments so I can get better placement and others can see the questions and answers. Remember that it all boils down to your inbound links!