Link juice

Link juice is an informal, industry-slang term for the SEO value that a link passes on to the page it points to. The idea grew out of the PageRank algorithm and captures the intuition that links "pour" a share of the linking page's authority into the destination.

How link juice flows

Every page holds a certain amount of authority, derived from the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing at it. When that page links out, some of this equity transfers to the link's target. How much flows depends on several factors: the authority of the source page, how many links it contains (the value is split across all of them), where the link sits within the content, and its attributes. A link carrying the nofollow attribute traditionally passed no value, though today Google treats it as a hint.

Practical application

Understanding how link equity flows helps you design site structure deliberately. Thoughtful internal linking lets you channel link juice from strong pages — the homepage or popular blog posts, say — toward the pages you want to promote, such as product pages, service pages or pillar articles.

In practice it pays to limit an excess of outbound links on a single page so you don't dilute its equity, and to eliminate orphan pages that no internal link reaches. The old "PageRank sculpting" trick — artificially steering equity by blanket-applying nofollow inside a site — lost its effectiveness after algorithm changes and is no longer recommended. These days link juice is best treated as a helpful metaphor rather than a precise, measurable metric.