Link Equity

What is link equity?

Link equity, often called link juice, is the ranking value that passes from one page to another through a hyperlink. It is the mechanism underneath every link based metric: when people say a link "passes authority", link equity is what they mean.

The concept descends from PageRank, the algorithm Google was originally built on. The modern version is far more complicated and no longer publicly visible, but the core intuition survives: a page holds some amount of value, and it distributes that value across the links it contains. A link from a page with many outbound links passes less than a link from a page with few.

Crucially, equity flows through internal links as well as external ones. Authority that arrives at your homepage does not stay there. It moves through your site along whatever paths your navigation and content create, which means your internal linking decides which of your pages can compete.

What affects how much flows

• The linking page's own authority. Value cannot be passed if there is none to pass.
• Number of outbound links on that page. More links means each gets a smaller share.
• Link attributes. A nofollow or sponsored link generally passes nothing.
• Placement. Contextual body links are weighted more than repeated footer or sidebar links.
• Indexability. A link on a noindexed or blocked page passes nothing, because the page is not counted.
• Redirects. A 301 passes most equity. A broken link passes none at all.

Why link equity matters for startups

Because it explains the most common frustration in early SEO: a decent domain with pages that will not rank. The authority exists, it is simply pooled on the homepage and a couple of old posts, and nothing routes it to the pages you actually want to sell from.

Fixing that requires no outreach, no budget, and no permission. It is the rare piece of SEO work that is entirely within your control, which makes it the first thing to exhaust before chasing new backlinks.

Link equity in practice

A site has a hundred articles, a healthy Domain Rating, and a set of product pages ranking nowhere. Inspecting the internal links reveals the product pages are reachable only from the top navigation, while the articles link heavily to each other.

The fix is to add contextual links from the articles most related to each product page, using varied anchor text, and to remove or consolidate links to pages that do not matter commercially, such as duplicate tag archives. Nothing external changes. The equity already on the domain simply gets routed somewhere useful, and within weeks the product pages begin to move.

Rules of thumb

Link deliberately from your strongest pages to your most important ones. Find the pages with the most external links pointing at them, then make sure they link onward to whatever you need to rank.

Fix broken internal links and redirect chains when you find them. Every 404 is equity poured into a dead end, and every unnecessary hop in a chain loses a little more.

Common mistakes

• Nofollowing internal links to "sculpt" flow. This stopped working many years ago and now simply discards the equity.
• Burying key pages several clicks deep. The further a page is from your linked-to pages, the less reaches it.
• Linking out excessively from strong pages. Every additional outbound link dilutes the share each one receives.
• Ignoring broken links. Equity flowing into a 404 is simply lost.
• Publishing orphan pages. A page nothing links to receives nothing, regardless of how strong the domain is.

Related concepts

Link equity is measured at page level by URL Rating and summarised at domain level by Domain Rating. Whether a link transmits any equity comes down to dofollow versus nofollow status, and the descriptive signal it carries is anchor text. For the wider sequence of technical, content and authority work, see the SEO guide.