Link equity

How much equity a link passes is not a published number and cannot be measured directly. It is understood to vary with how authoritative and relevant the linking page is, how many other links that page carries, where the link sits in the page, and whether the link is marked sponsored, ugc, or nofollow. Every third-party 'link value' figure is a vendor's model of this, not a reading of it.

Equity also moves internally. A page that has earned strong external links can pass some of that value onward through its own internal links, which is why pointing your best-linked pages at the pages you actually want to rank is one of the cheapest wins in SEO — and one of the most commonly skipped.

Treat the term as a useful metaphor with limits. It describes a real phenomenon, but the fluid imagery invites false precision, and thinking of equity as a measurable quantity you can budget leads to worse decisions than thinking about relevance and quality directly.