Link equity
Link equity is the ranking value a link passes from one page to another. It is the modern, less-jocular name for what SEOs long called 'link juice', and it descends from PageRank, Google's original method of scoring pages by the links pointing at them.
Also called: link juice, PageRank, link value
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The idea comes from PageRank, the algorithm Google's founders described in 1998: a page's importance was estimated from the number and importance of the pages linking to it, and each page shared its own score out among the links it carried. Google retired the public PageRank score in 2016 and has since said that PageRank remains one signal among very many, so the modern system is neither published nor that simple.
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.
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.
How link equity flows
The original model is still the easiest way to reason about it. A page holds some value from the links pointing at it and passes a share of that value through each link it carries, so a page with five outbound links gives more to each than a page with five hundred. The value then continues onward through the linked page's own links, thinning at each step.
Equity moves internally as well as between sites. A page that has earned strong external links can pass some of that value on through its internal links, which is why linking from your best-linked pages to the pages you actually want to rank is one of the cheapest wins in SEO - and one of the most commonly skipped.
Redirects carry it forward. Google has said that 301 and other server-side redirects do not lose PageRank, so moving a page behind a permanent redirect keeps the value of the links pointing at it. Letting the old address return a 404 throws that value away.
What affects how much equity a link passes
None of these is published as a formula, but each is either documented by Google or follows directly from how link analysis works:
- The linking page's own links. A page that has earned links from strong, relevant sources has more to pass on. This is a property of the page, not only the domain - a deep page nobody links to on a famous site can pass less than a well-linked page on a modest one.
- Relevance. A link from a page on the same subject is a stronger and more trustworthy signal than one from an unrelated page, which is why topical fit matters more than headline authority.
- Position on the page. Links in the main body of the content are generally understood to count for more than links in footers, sidebars and sitewide templates.
- How many other links share it. The more outbound links a page carries, the less any single one stands out.
- Link attributes. rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc" tell Google not to treat a link as an endorsement. Since 2019 Google treats them as hints, so such a link may or may not count.
- Whether the page is indexed. A link on a page Google has not crawled and indexed passes nothing until it is.
How to estimate it, since you cannot measure it
No tool can read Google's figure, so every link equity number you see is a third-party estimate. Ahrefs' URL Rating and Domain Rating, Moz's Page Authority and Domain Authority, and Majestic's Trust Flow and Citation Flow each model link strength from that vendor's own crawl of the web. They are useful for comparing candidate pages with each other and misleading when read as a measurement of Google.
The more honest evidence is downstream: whether the linked page gains impressions, clicks and positions in Search Console after links arrive. That is correlation rather than proof, because rankings move for many reasons at once, but it measures the outcome you care about rather than a model of one of its inputs.
Putting link equity to work
- Find your best-linked pages. Search Console's Links report, or any backlink tool, shows which of your pages have earned the most external links.
- Link from them to the pages that matter. Add contextual internal links from those pages to the pages you want to rank, with link text that describes the destination.
- Stop the leaks you created. Redirect retired URLs that still have backlinks to their closest current equivalent instead of letting them return a 404.
- Earn links where they are easiest to earn. Research, guides and free tools attract links far more readily than product pages. Earn links to those, then share the value onward through internal links.
Common mistakes
- Nofollowing your own internal links to hoard equity. This was called PageRank sculpting, and it stopped working long ago: Google explained in 2009 that the share assigned to a nofollowed link simply evaporates rather than being redistributed to the others.
- Treating vendor scores as equity. A DR or DA figure is a model of link strength, not the value Google assigns. Buying links because they raise a third-party score optimizes the model, not the ranking.
- Orphaning your strongest pages. A page with excellent backlinks and no internal links out is a dead end for the value it has earned.
- Budgeting equity like a currency. Spreadsheets that assign each link a value and add them up produce confident numbers with nothing behind them. Relevance and quality are better guides than arithmetic.
Common questions
Do nofollow links pass link equity?
Not as a rule. A nofollow attribute asks Google not to treat the link as an endorsement, but since 2019 Google has treated nofollow as a hint rather than a strict instruction, so it may choose to count one. Plan on nofollow links passing little or no equity, and value them for the traffic and visibility they bring.
Does a 301 redirect lose link equity?
According to Google, no - 301 and other server-side redirects pass PageRank without loss. Redirecting a retired URL that still has backlinks to its closest current equivalent keeps that value; letting it return a 404 discards it.
Is link equity the same as Domain Authority?
No. Link equity is the value Google's own systems assign through links, which is not published. Domain Authority (Moz) and Domain Rating (Ahrefs) are third-party scores that estimate the strength of a whole site's backlink profile from each vendor's own crawl - useful approximations, not readings of Google.