Link equity

4 minute read · Updated 28 August 2026

Definition

Link equity — informally, link juice — is the ranking value a link passes on to the page it points at. It is not a number any tool can read; it is a way of describing a real behaviour of search engines.

Applied internally it means: whatever standing a domain has gets distributed along the links between its pages. A page that receives many relevant internal links inherits more of it than one that receives none.

Where it comes from and where it goes

The useful picture is a reservoir and a set of pipes. Links from other domains fill the reservoir — they are the only way new standing enters a site. Internal links are the pipes: they decide which of your pages receives what you already have.

That division explains why a site can have excellent backlinks and still rank badly. If a mention lands on the homepage and the homepage links onward to nothing in particular, the benefit sits in one place doing very little, while the pages that could convert sit four clicks deep and starve.

The arithmetic, roughly

Whatever a page has to pass on is divided among its outgoing links. Twenty links each carry more than two hundred do. That is the entire mechanism people are gesturing at with the word “juice”, and it is inherited directly from PageRank.

Three practical consequences follow:

Fewer, better links beat many. Not because a limit exists, but because each one is worth more.
Links from well-linked pages are worth more. A link from a page that itself receives a lot is worth more than one from a page nothing points at.
A redirect costs a little on the way through. Link the final URL rather than an address that bounces.

What does not work

“PageRank sculpting” — adding nofollow to internal links so more value flows through the remaining ones — stopped working in 2009. The share attached to a nofollowed link is discarded, not redistributed. If a page should not receive value, do not link to it.

Equally unproductive: hunting for a tool that displays a page’s link equity as a score. No such number is published. Third-party metrics approximate a domain’s overall strength; none of them can tell you how value moves between your own pages. The list of internal links pointing at a page is a better guide than any score.

Where it leaks

Four places where value goes missing without anyone deciding it should.

Links to non-canonical URLs. A link pointing at ?ref=newsletter instead of the clean address has to be reconciled through the canonical tag rather than arriving directly.
Redirect hops. Each one costs a little on the way through, and internal links pointing at redirects are entirely within your control to fix.
Pages nobody links to. An orphan inherits nothing and competes from a standing start.
Footers with fifty links. Every page divides its value across all outgoing links, and a bloated footer takes a share from every page on the site simultaneously.

Concentrating it deliberately

The productive question is not how to preserve value but where to point it. That decision comes first and everything else follows from it.

Name five to fifteen pages that should collect authority — the cornerstone content. Then make sure every page touching those subjects links to them, from inside the text rather than from a footer list. A topic cluster is this idea given a shape: many specific pages each linking back to one broad page, which accumulates what they collectively receive.

The counter-intuitive part is that concentrating value means linking less, not more. Every additional destination takes a share from the others.

Why no tool shows you the number

Domain Rating, Domain Authority, Trust Flow and their relatives are third-party estimates of a domain’s overall link strength. They are useful for comparing sites at a glance and are not measurements of anything Google publishes.

None of them can tell you how value moves between your own pages, because that depends on your internal link graph, which those tools model only partially. Some crawlers compute an internal PageRank approximation across a crawl, which is closer to useful — but it is still a model of a model.

The blunt substitute is better than it sounds: sort your pages by number of inbound internal links and compare that order against the order you actually want. Where the two disagree, you have found the work.

Going deeper: internal links vs. backlinks explains which half fills the reservoir and which half moves it — and why the second is the one you can act on today.

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