If you haven’t completed day 6 of the SEO course, you can review: DAY 6: Mapping Your Site Structure before starting this post.

“It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.”

- Robert Green Ingersoll -

Understanding links from a SEO point of view

Your ability to design a SEO friendly site comes from your understanding of Link juice flow and how you can leverage its power and compensate its weaknesses.

The lesson today will help you have a better understanding of what is link juice flow and how it works.

Why Link Juice Flow?

In order for your pages to be indexed (yes, remember pages get indexed, not sites), they first need to be crawled.

Using a proper site structure like we learned yesterday in “Day 6: Mapping Your Site Structure ” highly helps and increases your chances to meet this first requirement.

After a page has been crawled, if this one meets the minimum requirements of the search engines, it will be indexed.

In Google a page can be indexed either in the primary index (that is where you want to be) or the supplementary index (for the pages that are relevant enough to be indexed, but don’t have sufficient authority yet to figure in the primary index).

When it comes to link juice, only pages from the primary index in Google can transmit some; that is strictly from a SEO point of view,
backlinks from pages in the supplementary index are worthless.

You can easily identify those pages as they don’t have PR (not PR0 but really no PR).

Link juice is transmitted by links between different pages from the primary index only. Those links can both be internal or external.

You can identify pages from the primary index as they all carry a PageRank score ranging from 0 to 10.

The higher the PageRank, the more link juice each link from that page can transmit.

If you want to read more about PageRank, I invite you to read my old article Understanding Google PageRank.

How to Get a Page in the Primary Index?

For a page to get into the primary index of Google, it needs to receive a sufficient amount of link juice from other pages.

For the sake of explanation, let’s assume that what you need to get a page in the primary index is 10 points, and that each inbound link is worth 1 point; this would mean that this page would require at least 10 inbound links of 1 point value to be listed in the primary index.

How much link juice can a page give?

A page gives out about 80-90% of the link juice it receives.

This means that if a page receives 10 points, it can only give out 8-9 points.

In addition, that point value is divided by the number of links on the page

Also, there’s a restriction of 1 link value maximum from one page to another one. Any additional link towards a page already linked from the current page will not double the amount of link juice passed on towards that page, but instead half the amount of link juice passed on from each of those links.

Special cases

Under special circumstances, it is possible to prevent a link from giving away or sharing some of the link juice of a page.

The most popular methods being:

• Rel=”nofollow” attribute on the link.
• Unreadable links like JavaScript link or Flash link (Recent news
  would indicate that Google may now be able to read those.
  But I have yet to confirm this information).
• Meta Robots nofollow.

The link attribute rel=”nofollow” introduced by Google will prevent a page to give away link juice to the target page of the link, however it will not redistribute the excess of link juice and will absorb it just like a normal link.

Unreadable links however will bounce the link juice as they are completely ignored, just as if they didn’t exist on page.

If you are interested to learn more about this attribute, I invite you to read my posts:

• To “DoFollow” or to “NoFollow” that is the question…
• Can we survive the “NoFollow” Black hole?
• Did The “NoFollow” Attribute Really Change?

The Meta Robot NoFollow is an extremely powerful command and will have effect page wide. None of the links on that page will be followed or passed any link juice.

Exercise

The only assignment today is to read this lesson and make sure that you understand clearly how link juice flows and can be controlled.

In addition, you must learn to identify links that won’t give you link juice as they may end up being a waste of your efforts during a backlink campaign.

If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts below.