The boost given to a website‟s authority via inbound links from other authoritative websites
In the SEO industry, link juice is also called “link equity”. Backlinks from websites with higher authority and relevance on a topic will generate more link juice and help a page rank better on the search engine results page (SERP).
How Does Link Juice Work?
Suppose you have sites A and B. If all other ranking factors are constant and site A has one link while site B has no links, site A will rank higher in search results due to the link juice it receives from the external site linking to it. What happens if site B also gains one link? This depends on the amount of juice each link passes. Site A receives links from four sites while B receives links from two sites. All the linking sites receive link juice from other sites too. Since A receives links from more sites, there is more link juice being transferred to A and consequently, A is likely to rank higher than B in search results.
Link juice comes from:
- Pages that have content relevant to your site.
- Pages that have a high PageRank.
- Pages that have relatively few outbound links.
- Pages that contain quality content.
- Pages that appear high in SERPs.
- Pages that have user-generated content.
- Pages that are popular with social media audiences, i.e. they are mentioned often in social media.
Link juice doesn't come from:
- Pages that have nofollowed the link to your site.
- Pages with irrelevant content.
- Pages that have a lot of links; for example, ad links or site-wide links.
- Pages that are not indexed in search.
- Paid links.
- Links obtained in a link exchange scheme. (This is where you link to someone’s site in return for a link to your site, which essentially cancels the impact.)
- Links from unranked sites with no content.
How Do I Get Link Juice?
Link juice comes from external links (also known as hyperlinks or backlinks) to your website. You can earn more backlinks through the following methods:
- Make authoritative content and become the number one place for information on a topic
- Position your site or content as a resource
- Write actual blog posts for other websites in your industry
- Join industry groups and make partnerships
- Get quoted on other websites through PR efforts
- Fix links with link reclamation tactics!
