What does link juice mean in SEO? What’s link juice definition? Enough with the guess, here is all you need to understand. Including; it’s importance in SEO, and how you can increase a link’s juice. Without further ado :
What is Link Juice in General?
By technical definition, it may be hard to define link juice to a SEO newbie. So to understand link juice, then imagine this link juice example :
Two sites A and B, with the same content, backlinks, and ranking (let’s say they rank number three on Google for a certain term). Then another site, C links to A. This causes site A to rise to the first position. Then when site C also links to site B, site B displaces site A from the number one spot. Now site B ranks first and A second. So what exactly do you think happened?
Since the two sites A and B, got a link from the same site C, what changed? What do you think made B to rank higher than A after both obtaining a link from site C? Well, it’s because it got a link that had more power from site C. This power is the SEO slang “juice”. And the link power is the “link juice”.
Notice that when the “nofollow” tag is used on the link to site A, no juice is passed whereas the “nofollow” tag has not been used on site B hence link juice is passed. Have you noticed the difference? Good!
Poisoned Link Juice
On the contrary, Poisoned Link Juice may kill your site ranking. It is the exact opposite of positive juice that helps your site to rise up in ranking. A poisoned juice is the kind of link obtained from unethical sources that are mostly on a different niche as you. Examples of such web sources with “Poisoned Link Juice” may include sites that engage in; Spammin, P0rn, Gamblin, Druggs/Medicall prescription, hackin, Mallwares, Violennt/terrosrist activities, link xchange/buying/selling sites among others. So watch out for and avoid bad neighbors.
What is Link Juice in SEO?
In SEO link juice is just slang, a very useful one. Link juice is so important since it may determine a site’s Google PageRank. PageRank is a metric used by Google to gauge the importance of a website or blog. Other search engines also have their own metrics for website ranking. But all in all, link juice is still the base of link importance.
In simple SEO definition, link juice is the value of authority from a link on certain web page to another page of the same site or another.
Since you now know it is important to gain authoritative links, how can you increase link juice?
How to Increase Link Juice
Every site has some link juice but it is the quality that matters. It can be strong, weak, or totally not available. There are various factors that regulate the quality of link juice. From the factors below, you will learn how to optimize your link juice. They are:
NoFollow Tag
The nofollow tag tells search engines not to crawl a link, or a web page. A link with the nofollow tag passes no link juice whereas a link without the nofollow tag passes link juice.
Coding
There two coding factors that may affect link juice; coding language and coding error, so how can coding be amended to increase link juice?
- All broken links can be corrected to ensure the vote passes some juice to the linked material.
- Static links are better than dynamic links generated by scripts such as JavaScript.
- Links from images should have a description in the Alt tag.
Content
Google states that ‘Content is King’. Therefore links or pages with copied content are useless, in fact dangerous. Links from unique content are considered authoritative. Also links that appear near the top or inside the main content tend to pass more votes than those on the other parts such as sidebar or footer areas.
Keywords
Links from relevant pages with same keywords tend to do better than unrelated links.
Google PageRank
Google PageRank is directly related to link juice. So links from high PR sites will give your site a boost than those from sites with lower PageRanks.
Website Age
Older sites tend to be more influential than new sites thus it makes sense to have a link from authoritative older sites (more than six months old).
There are many techniques you may use to improve link juice, keep the discussion going.