link equity
Also called: link authority, link juice
Link equity (also called link juice or link authority) is the ranking value one page passes to another through a hyperlink. Google treats a link as a signal of relevance and trust, so pages linked from authoritative, topically related sources tend to rank better.
The idea traces back to PageRank, the algorithm Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed at Stanford in the late 1990s, which treated each link as a vote of confidence between pages. Google no longer shows a public PageRank score, but the underlying logic still runs. Its documentation states that “Google uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl.”
What decides how much passes
Not every link carries the same weight. The value moved depends on the authority of the linking page, how topically relevant it is, the anchor text and the words around it, and how many other links share that page (more outlinks means a thinner slice each). Only followed links from indexable pages pass equity at all.
Attribute tags change the picture. Google recommends rel="sponsored" for paid placements, rel="ugc" for user-generated links like comments, and rel="nofollow" when you would rather not vouch for a target. Links marked this way “will generally not be followed,” so they pass little or no equity.
One caveat on vocabulary: “link equity” is a practitioner term, not Google’s own. Google talks about links as signals, not a fixed amount of juice you can meter out. Treat it as a useful mental model, not a literal currency you can count to the drop.
How it affects your traffic
Link equity is the mechanism that turns backlinks into rankings, so it is the core reason a link-building program moves organic traffic at all. A few links from authoritative, relevant pages usually lift positions more than dozens of low-value or nofollowed ones, which is why targeting beats raw volume. Internal links then spread that equity to the pages you most want to rank, while a page that buries its links under noindex or excessive outbound links leaks the value it collected. Our link building work focuses on placements that actually pass equity to the URLs tied to revenue.
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