Page Rank and Link Juice Explained?

When a user types in a search query, the search engine’s number one goal is to return results that are high-quality, relevant, and able to best give them what they want. One of the 200+ factors Google takes into consideration to determine which web pages best fit the bill is Page Rank.

What is Google Page Rank?

Page Rank is a link analysis algorithm used by Google to help determine the relative importance of a website. Every website is given a Google Page Rank score between 0 and 10 on an exponential scale. 

The main way of acquiring Page Rank is through the acquisition of links from other websites with Page Rank to share. This is where the concept of Link Juice comes from.

Link Juice provides a way of illustrating and conceptualizing how Page Rank flows between pages and websites.

 

If you’ve been busy building links from other websites, every page on your website has a different amount of Link Juice contained within, and every link you add to the page is like connecting a pipe that allows juice to flow between pages.

Because every page has a different amount of Page Rank, different pages can transfer different amounts of Link Juice to other pages. The more links, or should I say pipes, you add from each page the smaller the fraction of the available Link Juice can be transferred to each page.

Normally your homepage has the highest Page Rank and therefore the largest amount of Link Juice to transfer. Any link from your homepage transfers that juice to the page it is connected to. Links from the homepage should therefore be used wisely and directed to the pages that are the most competitive, and that you want to rank most highly for.

This concept is how your pages link together, the number of internal links used and the text you use in the link is important. It also illustrates why links from other websites are so important to anyone wanting to rank higher. It’s never been an easy topic to explain, how did I do?

Link Juice Actions

You’ve read how internal links pass Keyword Relevance and Page Rank / Authority to other pages as well as helping users navigate through your site. What you now need to do is:

• Check if you have optimized your links from your homepage to direct Link Juice to your most important pages?
• Check if your most important pages have more internal links than the others?
• Check if your internal link anchors are relevant and consistent with the page you’re linking to and your keyword strategy?
• Build more links from other websites.