How does the flow of link equity work these days, and how can you harness its potential to help improve your rankings? Whether you’re in need of a refresher or you’ve always wanted a firmer grasp of the concept, this week’s Whiteboard Friday is required watching. Rand covers the basic principles of link equity, outlines common flow issues your site might be encountering, and provides a series of action items to ensure your site is riding the right currents.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about understanding and harnessing link equity flow, primarily internal link equity flow, so that you can get better rankings and execute on your SEO. A big thank you to William Chou, @WChouWMX on Twitter, for suggesting this topic. If you have a topic or something that you would like to see on Whiteboard Friday, tweet at me. We’ll add it to the list.
Principles of link equity
So some principles of link equity first to be aware of before we dive into some examples.
1. External links generally give more ranking value and potential ranking boosts than internal links.
That is not to say, though, that internal links provide no link equity, and in fact, many pages that earn few or no external links can still rank well if a domain itself is well linked to and that page is on that site and has links from other good, important pages on the domain. But if a page is orphaned or if a domain has no links at all, extremely difficult to rank.
2. Well-linked-to pages, both internal and external, pass more link equity than those that are poorly linked to.
I think this makes intuitive sense to all of us who have understood the concept of PageRank over the years. Basically, if a page accrues many links, especially from other important pages, that page’s ability to pass its link equity to other pages, to give a boost in ranking ability is stronger than if a page is very poorly linked to or not linked to at all.
3. Pages with fewer links tend to pass more equity to their targets than pages with more links.
Again, going off the old concept of PageRank, if you have a page with hundreds or thousands of links on it, each of those receives a much more fractional, smaller amount of the link equity that could be passed to it than if you have a page with only a few links on it. This is not universally… well, I just want to say this doesn’t scale perfectly. So it’s not the case that if you were to trim down your high link earning pages to having only one link and point to this particular page on your site, then you suddenly get tremendously more benefit than if you had your normal navigation on that page and you link to your homepage and About page and products page. That’s not really the case. But if you had a page that had hundreds of links in a row and you instead made that page have only a few links to the most important, most valuable places, you’ll get more equity out of that, more rank boosting ability.
4. Hacks and tricks like “nofollow” are often ineffective at shaping the flow of link equity.
Using rel=”no follow” or embedding a remotely executable JavaScript file that makes it so that browsers can see the links and visitors can, but Google is unlikely to see or follow those links, to shape the flow of your link equity is generally (a) a poor use of your time, because it doesn’t affect things that much. The old-school PageRank algorithm not that hugely important anymore. And (b) Google is often pretty good at interpreting and discounting these things. So it tends to not be worth your time at all.
5. Redirects and canonicalization lose a small amount of link equity. Non-ideal ones like 302s, JS redirects, etc. may lose more than 301, rel=canonical, etc.
So if I have a 301 or a rel=canonical from one page to another, those will lose or cost you a small, a very small amount of link equity. But more potentially costly would be using non-ideal types of redirects or canonicalization methods, like a JavaScript-based redirect or a 302 or a 307 instead of a 301. If you’re going to do a redirect or if you’re going to do canonicalization, 301s or rel=canonicals are the way to go.
So keeping in mind these principles, let’s talk through three of the most common link equity flow issues that we see websites facing.
Common link equity flow issues
A. A few pages on a large site get all the external links:
You have a relatively large site, let’s say thousands to tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of pages, and only a few of those pages are earning any substantial quantity of external links. I have highlighted those in pink. So these pages are pointing to these pink ones. But on this website you have other pages, pages like these purple ones, where you…
