While in the early days of the internet, surfing was purely based on links, search engines are now a central hub of daily online navigation. Accordingly, a good ranking in the organic search results is of enormous importance for the visibility of your own website.
Anyone looking for ways to improve the search engine ranking of their own website will sooner or later stumble across the SEO term link juice. The term is usually used in connection with the terms PageRank and backlinks, which are briefly explained here for further understanding:
What is a backlink?
In SEO, backlinks are all links that come into a website from other external and internal pages. In the early days of the internet, as already mentioned, a link was usually placed to the page from which the link originated – i.e. a link back – as it was otherwise difficult to reach the previous page. As this is no longer necessary today, the term backlink only describes the incoming links.
What does PageRank mean?
PageRank – named after its inventor and Google founder Larry Page and not after the English term for page – is a calculable quality factor of a website in SEO. This metric primarily evaluates the quality but also the quantity of incoming links on a page. Each individual website receives a PageRank value. If this website links to another page, it passes on its PageRank value to the linked page and therefore has an influence on the overall rating of the second page. The higher the PageRank value of a website, the more important search engines consider its relevance to a topic and the higher the website is listed in the organic search results. Now that these two terms have been briefly outlined, the following question remains:
What is Link Juice?
Link juice is another SEO quality factor of a website. While PageRank is a measurable parameter, link juice describes a construct of various SEO factors that describe the distribution of link power on a website. In addition to the quality and quantity of backlinks, the ranking in the organic search results and the distribution of links also play a role. In order to describe this somewhat complex construct, we have created a diagram that better describes the relationships:
The central container in the top center represents the homepage of a website. Due to its importance, the strong linking within the website and the fact that most external links (symbolized by the yellow juice) arrive on the homepage, it has the most link juice available (the red juice in the diagram).
In order to distribute this link juice optimally, the start page should redirect to the most important category pages. Only the most important pages should be selected as targets, as the link juice is distributed evenly across all links. As a result, the more links that come from the start page, the less link juice the individual web pages receive. To illustrate this, the external link juice mixes with the internal link juice to form an orange juice (the juice flow).
The category pages should then redirect to individual services or products so that these benefit from the link juice in the third instance. As a general rule, every important page should be linked to as many other pages as possible in order to emphasize the relevance of the page for the search engine.
How can I avoid wasting linkjuice?
In the past, to avoid wasting link juice, links to pages, such as the legal notice, were given a nofollow attribute. However, Google made this nofollow tactic useless years ago with an update. A nofollow attribute no longer prevents the flow of link juice. These pages should therefore be excluded for the crawlers in the robot.txt file.
What needs to be considered?
When linking the individual pages, in addition to the pure number of redirects on a page, care should be taken to ensure that the internal links are made with the exact same keyword, as this makes Google aware that the page is important for this linked keyword. It is of central importance that every content page is linked to at least one other website with sufficient link juice, as the complete absence of link juice makes a page almost invisible.
Conclusion
Link Juice is a powerful SEO tool that should be actively used to strengthen the most important pages of a website. By creating a planned and sensible internal link structure, important pages can also be trimmed towards their central keyword. However, this should be done carefully so that no link juice is wasted. Attention should also be paid to the relevance and trustworthiness of the external backlinks. If these points are observed, nothing stands in the way of a strong link juice flow.
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