Link Juice
How Authority Moves Between Pages

By Andrew Linksmith, Head of Link Acquisition · Update: 4 August 2026

Link Juice: How Authority Moves Between Pages

Link juice is informal shorthand for link equity — the authority a page passes to the pages it links to. The term descends from PageRank, the original algorithm for estimating a page's importance from the link graph. A page distributes a share of what it has across its outbound links, which is why the number of links on a page matters as much as the page's own standing.

The phrase is imprecise and practitioners still use it because it captures something real — it is the mechanism behind everything in the link building guide: authority behaves like a quantity that moves, divides and gets lost. Understanding how it divides is what makes internal linking worth doing deliberately rather than by habit.

How authority passes through a link

Strip out the mathematics and the mechanism is this: a page has some standing, it hands a portion of that standing to every page it links to, and the portion each recipient gets shrinks as the number of outbound links grows.

Now change one variable. The same page with eleven commercial outbound links hands each recipient roughly nine units instead of twenty-five. Nothing about the publisher changed — only how much company your link is keeping.

That is the practical reason outbound commercial link density is a buying criterion, not a stylistic preference. An article stuffed with paid placements is dividing whatever it has eleven ways, and you paid for one eleventh. Full evaluation framework in the six criteria for link quality.

What affects how much passes

One correction worth making because it is widespread: nofollowed links are not zero. Google treats the attribute as a hint rather than an absolute directive, meaning such links may still be considered. Treating them as worthless leads people to ignore genuinely valuable placements and to build profiles with no nofollow at all — which looks constructed rather than accumulated.

Internal linking: the part you fully control

External links cost money or months. Internal links cost a few minutes and determine whether any of that external authority ever reaches the pages that make money. This is the highest-leverage and most neglected work in the whole discipline.

The wider context for all of this sits in the main link building guide. The practical audit takes an hour: list your five most-linked pages, list your five most commercially important pages, and check how many internal links connect the first group to the second. In most sites the answer is zero to two, which means the external link budget is landing somewhere and stopping there. Applied versions in ecommerce link building and SaaS link building.

Where sites leak link equity

1. Broken inbound links pointing to 404s — Someone linked to a page that no longer exists. The authority is sitting in a dead end. Export your 404s with referring domains attached and redirect each to the closest live equivalent — this is the cheapest link acquisition available, because you already earned these.

2. Redirect chains — A URL redirecting to a URL redirecting to a URL. Each hop erodes what arrives and slows crawling. Point every redirect directly at the final destination.

3. Orphan pages — Pages with no internal links pointing at them. They receive nothing and are crawled infrequently, which for a linkable asset means it never ranks, which means the passive link phase never begins.

4. Noindexed sections receiving internal links — Internal links pointing at pages excluded from the index send value into a room with no door.

5. Excessive outbound links on your own strong pages — Your best pages dividing their authority across dozens of external links. Audit the outbound count on your top-linked pages and trim what is not doing a job for the reader.

Item one deserves emphasis because it is the only one that recovers something you have already paid for. Every link pointing at a 404 is a placement someone once earned or bought, now producing nothing. A morning spent on redirects routinely recovers more than a month of acquisition adds.

Link juice myths

Myth: you can sculpt PageRank with nofollow

The idea that adding nofollow to unimportant internal links concentrates authority in the important ones.

What is true instead: this stopped working when the handling changed years ago. Authority is now divided across all outbound links whether or not some are nofollowed — so sculpting discards the share rather than redistributing it. Control internal flow through structure and link placement, not attributes.

Myth: there is a hard limit of 100 links per page

A widely repeated rule with a real origin — an old crawling guideline about page size — and no current basis.

What is true instead: there is no fixed cap. But every additional outbound link reduces what each one carries, so the practical constraint is dilution rather than a threshold. Fewer, better-chosen links serve both the reader and the maths.

Myth: only the first link to a URL counts

The claim that if a page links twice to the same destination, the second link is ignored.

What is true instead: this has been observed in some contexts and is not a reliable rule to build on. The safe practice is simple — link once, in the most contextually appropriate place, with the anchor you actually want.

Myth: nofollow links are worthless

Treating any nofollowed link as a zero and declining placements on that basis.

What is true instead: Google treats the attribute as a hint rather than a directive, so these links may be considered. They also carry referral traffic and brand visibility, and a profile with no nofollow at all looks manufactured.