link dilution

Where the split comes from

The idea traces to Google’s original PageRank model: a page passes a share of its own score to each page it links to, divided by how many links it has. Simplified:

value per link ≈ (page PageRank × 0.85) / number of outbound links

The 0.85 is the damping factor from the original formula. The practical result is per-link: a link from a page carrying 3 outbound links moves far more weight than one from a page carrying 300. A focused article that links to five sources passes more equity per link than a resource dump or a footer stuffed with hundreds of links.

Dilution hits internal links too. Every menu item, related-post block, and footer link drinks from the same page’s equity. On large sites this is why deep pages starve: hub pages spread equity across thousands of links and little reaches the pages that actually need to rank.

What actually concentrates equity

One tempting fix does not work. Marking internal links rel="nofollow" to hoard PageRank for your priority pages was killed in 2009. Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed that a nofollowed link still takes its share of the page’s equity, but that share is simply not passed on. It evaporates rather than flowing to your other links, so nofollow sculpting does not redirect equity where you want it.

rel="nofollow", sponsored, and ugc still have a real job. They tell Google not to pass ranking credit through paid, user-generated, or untrusted links, which is a vouching and compliance signal, not a way to funnel more equity into the rest of the page. The levers that genuinely concentrate equity are structural: cut the raw number of links a page carries, prune low-value outbound links, merge redundant internal links, and favor placements on focused pages so each remaining link gets a bigger share.