What is link juice? – Organic SEO #6

We have already covered the importance of links in organic SEO — namely that the more websites linking to yours, the better your rankings. That is the simplified explanation. In reality, things are slightly more complex: what is known as link juice plays a major role in this. Here is how it works….

What is link juice?

Link juice represents the benefit conferred by a website on the web page it links to.

You can think of it as the quality of the transfer of popularity from one page to another, or as its SEO power.

To make this clearer, here is a concrete example.

Imagine a glass of water — that is your website. Next to it, a glass of orange juice — that is Site B, a different website.

When Site B places a link pointing to your site and only yours, it pours all its orange juice into your glass. The water mixes with the juice, turns orange, and the taste changes. In short, the action has had a visible effect on you.

In this example, your site benefits from Site B's SEO and gains greater visibility.

Now imagine that Site B — the glass of orange juice — has multiple links, each pointing to a different website. One of those links points to your site, but the other 99 links point to 99 different sites. In our analogy, this is the equivalent of pouring one glass of orange juice into 100 glasses of water. Each glass receives just a single drop of juice. The glass does not change in appearance; the water keeps the same taste and colour. So no meaningful impact in terms of SEO.

That is link juice. The more external links a site has pointing to different destinations, the less those destinations benefit from its SEO power.

How is link juice value calculated?

We have just seen that the number of external links on a site affects the quality of its link juice. But that is not the only criterion.

A few key criteria include:

• The density of outbound links, as discussed above.
• The quality and popularity of the originating site: the better the referring site ranks in search results, the greater its impact on your own site.
• The position of the link on the originating page (a link placed within a header paragraph will carry more weight than a link at the bottom of the page).
• The anchor text: that is, the word or words that are hyperlinked. For example, a simple "Click here" should be avoided. On the other hand, if you are linking to a page titled "SEO Definition", using the anchor text "SEO Definition" is optimal.

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It is worth noting that Google, in particular, does not reveal all its secrets. As a reminder, SEO professionals are estimated to know only around 15% of the criteria used in Google's algorithms. It would therefore be difficult to produce an exhaustive list, but these few points should already give you a head start. That is certainly our hope.

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