What Is Link Juice?
Link juice is a term SEOs use to convey the idea of passing ‘domain authority’. Every ‘do-follow’ backlink or internal link on the internet transfers link juice to some extent. The ‘no-follow’ attribute prevents this from happening by design.
A new website with no domain authority will not have a lot of link juice, but an older domain with many links pointing to it will. Typically, the homepage will receive the majority of links, and therefore will have the most link juice. This can be seen by comparing the ‘page authority’ of the different pages on your domain via third party tools such as Moz and Ahrefs.
Link Juice & Internal Links
The reason why it’s important to interlink pages on your website is partially because it’s important to allow link juice to flow throughout your website. This should not be done randomly but with some strategy as part of an On-page SEO strategy.
You should emphasise the important pages on your website by pointing more links to them than less important pages. Links should also be arranged in a logical order such that only related pages link to each other, and only where it makes sense.
It’s important that links are placed in the body of the text rather than in the header, sidebar or footer, where they are not regarded as highly by Google.
Silos – Structure Of Internal Links For Maximum Results
SEOs arrange internal links into ‘silos’. There are many different types. These are link arrangements that allow for link juice to flow in particular patterns. Generally, it’s recommended to use an arrangement called the ‘Reverse Silo’.
In this arrangement the higher level page always links to several relevant pages below it, which link back to the same higher level page. This is great because topical relevance is kept intact while ‘cul-de-sacs’ are prevented. Link juice never meets a dead end, no matter which page receives a backlink.
Importance Of Anchor Text For Link Juice
Anchor text, briefly, is the word or words used in a hyperlink. This matters as it allows Google to better understand what the destination page is about. Make sure to use highly relevant words that match the keywords you want the destination page to rank for.
Backlinks And Link Juice
The only way to gain more link juice is through backlinks. This is the crux of Off-page SEO. Higher domain authority websites will pass on more link juice. This link juice is infused with relevance, depending on the domain passing it.
Link juice can also be diluted. If a page has 10 links, then each of these links is pushing 10% of the original link juice of the page.
This is why news sites often have very high DA’s, often 80-90+, but backlinks from these sites are usually not great. These sites often have much too many links per page, and because they often are not niche specific, their relevance is often poor for any given niche.
