I reference link juice a lot on this site and admittedly backlinking isn’t the be all end all of SEO that it once was, you still need to have links pointing to your site and pages to help them to rank as it’s still a paramount factor in ranking for the time being. This is why I think we should now clarify exactly what link juice is and how it is measured so you can get a better idea of what I and other SEOers are always referencing.

What is Link Juice

Link juice is plainly the amount of influence which a link pointing to a page will give to that page. The more link juice or in other words the more influence which the linked from page passes to the linked to page, the more of a boost in the search engines that linked to page will enjoy for the keywords it’s targeting.

How to Calculate Link Juice?

Now that we’ve identified what it is, where does link juice come from and how is it calculated by search engines? A number of different factors play in to calculate how much link juice or influence a page will pass on. Let’s take a look at the major factors which calculate link juice:

Page Rank – Page rank is as a rough quality score from Google for your site on a scale of 0 to 10. The higher your page rank, the more trusted it’s deemed as being, so the higher the page rank for a page linking to your site, the more influence it’s going to pass on to you.

Domain That Page is On – In a similar vein, the domain which that linking from page resides on will play a huge role in defining the amount of link juice which will be passed if it links to another page. A more trusted, older, established authority site is going to pass on a lot more influence than a less trusted, newer, unproven site.

For instance, one of the most oft cited examples of an authority domain would be “CNN.com”. CNN is a trusted name in the news world and their website is no exception. If CNN creates a link from their site to another site, regardless of whether it’s a DoFollow or a NoFollow tag with it and regardless of what kind of anchor text they use to link to your site, it’s going to seriously help your site and that page specifically rank.

Conversely, if you get a link from “MaleEnhancementAcaiBerries.info”, it’s not going to bring in a tiny fraction of what that the authority site CNN brought in.

Backlinking Links – Another factor in determining the amount of influence a page has is the number of links pointing to THAT page. Pages which are being linked to by other webmasters are seen as being more trustworthy in Google’s eyes and therefore hold more juice to send on to pages which THEY link to.

This is why a lot of webmasters believe in backlinking their backlinks. They create a Web 2.0 page, maybe a free blog on BlogSpot, create content on it, and then create backlinks to that BlogSpot page, they believe that that BlogSpot page will send them more link juice to their site than if they hadn’t created backlinks to the BlogSpot page.

Internal Links – Let’s put those last two factors together now with interior pages. Internal pages pass on link juice to other pages on the same site. So to keep in that example, if you receive a link from CNN to a page on your site, that page on your site now has more link juice. Your site as a whole will now have more authority and specific pages you link to from that page will have more authority and influence, as well.

I noticed this years ago on this site when a high ranking site created a link to one of my pages of content. I immediately shot up to number one for that keyword. I had another post which was very similar in the content as the first page so I linked the page which received the link to my other post and that post jumped to the first page on Google for its keyword, as well. This just goes to show the power of internal links.

Note that there is no way to quantify link juice exactly. While we can’t quantify link juice between one page and another precisely, we can understand and acknowledge that certain pages are certainly going to pass on more link juice than others in Google’s eyes, sometimes substantially so, and so they are more worth our time when we are going out of our way to create or better said “earn” links to our site.