What is link juice?

Link juice, also known as link equity, is a term from online marketing that describes the value and effectiveness of a link from one web page to another. That value is set by factors such as the authority of the linking page, how relevant the content of the two pages is to each other, and how fresh the link is. Link juice can be seen as a form of recommendation: a page that many other high authority pages link to receives a kind of seal of quality, which lifts its potential in search rankings. Other names for link juice are link power and link authority.

How can you measure link equity?

Measuring link equity directly is not possible, because search engines like Google do not disclose their exact algorithms. There are SEO tools, though, that offer their own metrics for estimating it. Those metrics are usually built on factors such as the number and quality of incoming backlinks, the authority of the linking domains, and the topical relevance between the linked pages. Tools like Moz’s Domain Authority, Ahrefs’ Domain Rating or Majestic’s Trust Flow can give you useful reference points here. It is important to understand, however, that these values are approximations and do not represent the actual link equity in the sense that search engines use it.

What effect does link juice have on SEO?

Link juice is an essential part of search engine optimization. Links with high link equity can improve the ranking of a web page in the search results considerably. They signal to search engines that a page is trustworthy, relevant and of high quality, and search engines then treat that page favorably in their results. Strong link equity can also help new content get indexed faster and rank better. What counts is that you use natural link building methods, because artificial or manipulative links can be recognized by search engines and counted against you.

Link equity does not only arrive from other websites. Every internal link passes part of the value of one page on to the next, which is why internal linking is the part of link equity you control completely. If you want to know how the equity of your own site is distributed and where it gets stuck, that is part of ongoing SEO support. More terms from this field are in the SEO glossary.