Link juice, while seemingly vague at first, is really just a term that refers to the value of linking to other sites. Also known as “link equity,” link juice is a very important ranking factor every webmaster should know. In this article, we’ll explore the meaning of link juice and how it affects your search engine rankings.
What is Link Juice?
Link juice refers to the amount of authority and value a link passes to another webpage.
If you have a high-quality website, then you are likely to have a lot of backlinks. That’s because people link to your site when they want to shout about what they think is an interesting or useful article. The more links you have pointing to your site, the better your site will rank for specific queries and terms. The main reason people care about link juice is that Google (and other search engines) use it to determine how much authority your site has.
Note: The more links you have and the higher quality those links are, the higher you rank in search results. Link juice refers to how much weight your links carry for ranking your content in search results.
Why Is Link Juice Important for SEO?
If you have more authoritative links pointing to your site than other sites, then you’re probably getting better search rankings than your competitors are. But if your competitors have more links than you do, they may be able to outrank you in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Google’s algorithm looks at tons of factors when determining what pages are relevant for a search query, including the number of incoming links pointing to your pages and whether those links are inbound or outbound. In other words, if someone links to your page from another page on their website or blog, then that counts toward your score!
How to Get More Link Juice to Your Website
- Guest posts: There’s no better way to get more link juice than to write guest posts on high-authority websites. Guest posts are essentially articles that are embedded on another site’s page and will link back to your own website as long as you have a reciprocal link network in place. This is a great way of getting your name out there while also giving back to the community around you.
- Improve your website’s content: One of the best ways to get more link juice is to be seen as an authority in your industry. If you’re an expert, then other people will be more likely to share your work. If you’re a writer, for example, and you write about a certain topic, other writers might think it’s worth linking to your article. If it’s an interesting post that relates to their own interests, they’ll probably link to it too.
- External links: External links can come from anywhere: other websites, social media platforms, forums, etc. The best way to get them is by building relationships with other websites that are relevant to your target audience and then asking them to link back to you. You can also create content around the same topic as another website and then ask them if they’d like a link back to their site.
- Internal links: While building external links is all about getting traffic from other sites, you also need to make sure that you focus on building internal links within your own website too. Internal links can help you gain more link juice in two ways: first, they provide users with a natural way to navigate around your site; and second, they help search engines find pages on your site that are relevant to their users’ queries (and therefore should be ranked higher in their results).
How to Discover How Link Juice is Performing
The easiest way to find out what kind of link juice your website has is to use Google Search Console (GSC) and search for the domain name of your site. You can also use the free MozBar plugin for Chrome or Firefox, which will show you how many links point back to your site from other websites. Open Site Explorer and Ahrefs Site Explorer can help you analyze the link juice of other websites. Each tool has its own pros and cons, but they all provide similar information about how many links are pointing back at your site.
A critical factor in determining whether your site will rank highly is how much link juice you have, which will be determined by the quality of your backlinks. So use your link equity wisely, and keep an eye on your search engine ranking to decide when and where you are ready to add or remove links from your sites. It’s time to get the most out of your link-building efforts starting now – and you’ll be glad you did!
