Introduction to Link Juice Optimization

A link or a hyperlink is specially coded text that users can click on, to reach to the webpage or an element of a webpage associated with that link’s code. It is a connection between one web page to another.

The clickable text is called ‘anchor text’ is often made bold, underlined or of a different color.
A link has two ends — called anchors — and a direction. The link starts at the “source” anchor and points to the “destination” anchor, which may be any Web resource. For e.g. Image, Video, Text.

There are two types of links on a webpage from an optimization perspective:

1. Inbound links – Inbound links are those links which are coming from others’ website to our website. e.g. our link is on other’s website in form of our k eyword.

2. Outbound links – Outbound links are those links which are pointing to someone else’s website from our website.  e.g. Another’s website link is on our website as in the form of a keyword.

Link juice
The phrase ‘Link Juice’ was coined by Internet Marketer and SEO consultant Greg Boser around 2007 and since then it has acquired a place of its own in the SEO world. It refers to how much benefit a link is passing on. Or, what is the pass through ratio of link equity. Further, it also refers to how much weight a page is perceived to contain. This weight it can share with other pages it links to, internally or externally.

Link juice flow
The amount of link juice available in each web page is indicated by its page rank. Let a web page rank has page rank 6. I t means it has 6 times the amount of link juice available compared to a page which page rank is 1. The quality of the link juice passed through a web page is depends on the number of outbound links. If we have two web pages with equal amount of web juice but one has 1 outbound link and another one has 6 outbound links. The quantity of link juice released to a third page from the single outbound link page, will be 6 times the quantity of the link juice passed from the web page with 6 outbound links.

Now, link juice that gets passed is dependent on the PR of the page and is spread across the number of out bound links. On the simple basis, the PR of a page is expressed some what exponentially, so a PR7 is not 7 times better then PR1, it is more like that 128 times better. That juice is split up amongst the outbound links on the page. So if there are 100 other links on a PR7 page, it is more akin to the juice from a sole link on a PR1 page. Means links from a high ranking page is better, but the number of outbound links does dilute the juice passed.

Consider an illustration of flow of link juice:

Here the link juice is coming to the two web pages A and B. A receives 100 units of link juice and B receives 9 units of link juice. A has two outbound links (C and D) and each link is carrying 50 unit of link juice to C and D.

Whereas web page B has three outbound links (one goes to web page C). Web page C has total 53 units of link juice because it has incoming link with 50 units and 3 units. But the Web page D receives only 50 units of link juice. And after that the link juice is further passed on.

Link Juice Optimization
When we try to control the flow of link juice in our website, this practice is called link juice optimization. It is the practice by which the page rank flows in a website.
It is also called page rank sculpting.

On many occasions, corporates have found out that their highest ranking pages are their privacy policy pages or profile pages instead of their conversion pages. The reason is not that not only are these pages filled with the company and/ or product name, but also they’re getting high quantity of link juice from linking directly to the higher ranked homepage, and similarly from many other pages in the site. In other words, the page rank for such low importance pages is unnecessarily high. This is called link juice leakage. This is corrected using rel=”nofollow” tag.

No Follow Tag

A link on a web page is followed during the indexing process of Search engines. Pages with many incoming links are ranked higher in searches than pages with few incoming links.

If there are links on your blog that you don’t want search engines to find, use the No Follow tag to make them invisible in terms search indexing and ranking. A link using the ‘no-follow’ tag will look like this:
<a href=”http://www.anothersite.com” rel=”nofollow”>Another Site</a>.
When a search engine sees a ‘no-follow’ tag in an HTML link, it will not follow it, nor assign link popularity to the destination page.
No follow tags are the method of link juice optimization. Suppose that main website is having page rank 6. It consists of three numbers of pages. And let they have page rank 2.

Perceived overuse and/ or abuse of No Follow tag: So when No Follow started getting used, it started boosting the page rank of the other two pages. To get over this problem, Google started treating ‘No Follow’ as the same as ‘Do Follow’, and the result is that today we get a score of two on both the pages.

Today’s Page Rank Flow:
As shown in the diagram on the right.

These No Follow tags should be used for links like:

1. Login/ Signup/ Register
2. Logo
3. Archives
4. Copyright
5. Privacy Policy
6. Terms of Service
7. Feedback

Dangers of No Follow Tag: There are dangers in the usage of no follow links, as it is an advanced SEO technique. Consider a page A and another page Y.

A is sending link juice to page Y. Let we apply a No Follow and now we’re passing zero link juice. Now what would happen is that Y would suffer from loss of link juice and might not get indexed by Google. So, A which wanted to send all its juice to B, now finds that B cannot be made to benefit from pages C, D & E (which are good maybe), which too have suffered because Y never got sufficient link juice and hence crawling and indexation by Google. So B fails to get the benefit from C, D & E. On a large website such errors could propagate and cause problems.

Consider another method of link juice optimization. To redirect your link juice to your important pages, place links on every pages in the form of your keywords and then redirect those links to your important pages.
Consider a website W, with three (or more) identified conversion pages A, B, and C. Also consider a list of keywords x1, x2, … xn, which are to be targeted on the search engines. Further we have the website pages W1, W2,…. Wk. For each website page Wi, identify a set of keywords {x}, and link them to the conversion pages A, B and C. This ensures that we direct traffic and link juice from our internal pages to our high conversion pages.

Thanks
Muskan Sharma
SEO Executive
Grazitti Interactive^™