What is Link Juice?

The whole idea of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is getting your website to be among the top results on search engines. If it comes up on the first couple pages of Google or Yahoo more people are likely to visit your site. “Link juice” is a term used in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and has recently gone viral and gone into widespread usage.

Link Juice Explained

When another website links to your site or when you internal page links, the link improves PageRank. These links must be relevant to the content being linked to or Google’s new algorithm “Panda” will penalise you. This improvement of PageRank by the method explained above is commonly referred to as “link juice.”

The amount of link juice passed depends on a couple things. First, the PageRank of the web page the link came from and, second, the total number of links on the web page that are being passed. Each time a link is passed Google will award PageRank points. These points add up and web pages can earn an overall PageRank of 0-10.

Simply put, every web page has a limited amount of link juice it can pass along, and the limit is the total PageRank points that particular page has received. Thus, a web page with 20 points cannot pass more than 20 points of link juice. If a page with 20 PageRank points links to another page, that one link will transfer the full amount of link juice to the other web page. However, if a page with 20 PageRank points links to five web pages whether they be internal or external), only one-fifth of the link juice will be transferred.

Essentially link juice is the very thing that you are looking to achieve in SEO. The more people that provide links to your pages the better PageRank you will achieve. When you link to relevant high PageRank web pages your visibility and web page rankings become higher.

Getting your own link juice

Link juice can come from a number of sources. One could be generated by yourself by submitting to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, and LinkedIn. Another could be by asking people with relevant pages to provide links to your web page. One method that is gaining traction is content marketing . Writing quality, relevant content and posting links to it on various Social Media sites has proven to be an effective medium to long-term strategy that works.