What is link equity?
Link equity is the ranking value a link passes from one page to another — the SEO community's name for the authority that flows along links (older articles called it 'link juice'). It's the currency of structural SEO: backlinks bring it into your domain, and your internal links decide where it goes. Understanding how equity enters, moves, splits, decays, and leaks is what separates deliberate internal linking from hoping the template does the job.
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Where link equity comes from
Two sources. External equity arrives via backlinks from other domains and lands on whatever pages they point at — usually your homepage and a few hero pages. Internal equity is what your own pages pass to each other along internal links. The two combine: a page's authority is the equity it receives from everywhere, internal and external, recursively weighted by how strong those linking pages are.
The split that matters: You can't control where backlinks land, but you control 100% of where internal equity flows. Most sites obsess over earning more external equity and let their internal distribution happen by accident — which is backwards, because distribution is the free part.
How it moves: split and decay
Equity obeys the same two rules as all internal authority flow. It splits: a page divides the equity it can pass across all its outbound links, so a page linking to 4 things gives more to each than one linking to 40. And it decays: a little is lost with each hop, so equity reaches nearby pages strongly and distant ones faintly.
backlinks [Home]
|||| --> external --> equity 100
| |
50 50 <- splits across links
v v
[Hub] [Page]
~16 ea <- decays + splits
/ | \ again downstream
[leaf][leaf][leaf]What leaks or wastes equity
- Redirect chains — each hop in A→B→C→D bleeds a little equity. Link directly to the final URL.
- Broken links (404s) — equity sent to a dead page is simply lost; it goes nowhere and comes back as nothing.
- Split duplicates — when one page is reachable at many URLs, its inbound equity shatters across the variants instead of consolidating. Canonicalisation reunites it (see authority flow).
- Nofollow on internal links — tells engines not to pass equity, so the target is starved even though it's reachable.
- Dilution — mega-menus and bloated footers spread equity so thinly across hundreds of links that no single target gets a usable share.
- Orphans — pages with no inbound links receive only the baseline; the equity never reaches them at all (orphan pages).
External and internal equity are one pool
Link building and internal linking are usually treated as separate disciplines, which obscures that they act on the same quantity at different stages.
- External links bring equity into the site. You influence this indirectly and slowly, and it lands wherever people happen to link — usually the homepage and a handful of popular posts.
- Internal links distribute it. You control this completely and can change it today.
So the two are complements rather than alternatives, and the ordering matters. Earning links to a site that routes authority badly delivers it to pages that hoard it. Improving distribution on a site with almost no inbound equity redistributes very little. The highest return is on sites that have earned links and never wired the structure — which is more common than it sounds, because link building is visible work and internal linking is not.
A useful diagnostic: find the pages holding the most external links, then look at what they link to. If the answer is mostly the navigation and each other, you have equity arriving and never reaching the pages that matter.
Where equity goes missing
Beyond splitting and decaying normally, several common patterns lose equity outright. All are fixable.
- Redirect chains — every hop is another chance to lose a little, and a chain of three or four is common after a migration. Point internal links at the final URL.
- Links to non-canonical variants — trailing-slash, parameterised or http versions of the same page split what should land on one URL.
- Nofollowed internal links — the share is not passed and not redistributed. It simply disappears.
- Broken internal links — a link to a 404 passes nothing and wastes the slot it occupies on the source page.
- Dead-end pages — pages that receive equity and link nowhere accumulate it without circulating any of it back.
- Orphaned strong pages — a page with external backlinks that nothing internal links to holds equity the rest of the site can never reach.
That last one is the most valuable to find and the least likely to be noticed. An externally-linked page that is internally orphaned is a reservoir with no outlet — see orphan pages.
Three things equity is not
- A number Google publishes. Link equity is a model for reasoning about how ranking power moves, not a metric you can look up. Third-party scores estimate something adjacent and are not it.
- Conserved. It is not a fixed quantity moved around a closed system — it decays at each hop, is lost through nofollow, and enters continuously from outside.
- Everything. Equity decides which of your relevant pages ranks; it does not make an irrelevant page rank. A page that does not answer the query gets crawled more and still loses.
The arithmetic, concretely
Split and decay are easy to nod along to and hard to feel. Numbers make the consequences obvious.
a page holding 100 units, passing ~85% onward\n\n outbound links each link carries\n --------------- -----------------\n 5 ~17\n 20 ~4.3\n 60 (footer) ~1.4\n 200 (mega-menu) ~0.4\n
Two things follow that change how you link. A page with five outbound links passes each target roughly forty times what a two-hundred-link mega-menu does — so where a link sits matters more than whether it exists. And every link you add reduces every other link on that page, which means removing a pointless link is a way of strengthening the rest.
Now chain it. If each hop passes on roughly 85% and splits it, a page four hops from your strongest content through pages with twenty links each receives a vanishing fraction — the compounding described in authority travel distance. Shortening the path is usually worth more than adding another link at the far end.
Does nofollow redirect equity?
Not any more, and this is the most persistent outdated tactic in internal linking.
The original idea, "PageRank sculpting", was to nofollow links to low-value pages so their share flowed to the rest. It worked briefly. The handling then changed: a nofollowed link's share is no longer redistributed to your other links — it is simply not passed. The page still counts as an outbound link for the division, so the equity evaporates rather than moving.
Nofollowing internal links loses equity instead of concentrating it. If a page does not deserve a link, remove the link. If it must stay linked for users, leave it followed — the cost is smaller than the loss.
How to concentrate it where it counts
- Route equity deliberately: contextual links from strong, relevant pages to the targets you want to rank.
- Fix the leaks first — collapse redirect chains, repair broken links, resolve duplicate URLs, and stop nofollowing internal links you want fed. Plugging leaks often beats earning new backlinks.
- Trim low-value outbound links on important pages so the equity they pass concentrates on fewer, better targets.
- Keep priority pages shallow so they receive less-decayed equity — the travel distance principle.
Equity is conserved, not created: Internal links never make more equity — they only redistribute what you have. Every structural choice is a decision about where to spend a fixed budget. Spend it on the pages that earn rankings or revenue.
FAQ
Is link equity the same as link juice?
Yes — 'link juice' is the older, informal term for the same thing: the ranking value a link passes to its target. Link equity is the same concept stated more precisely, and it's the currency that flows through internal authority models like PageRank.
Do nofollow internal links pass link equity?
Largely no. A nofollow tells search engines not to pass equity through that link, so the target is starved even though a crawler can still reach it. Nofollowing internal links you actually want ranked is a common, self-inflicted leak.
How do I stop wasting link equity?
Fix the leaks: collapse redirect chains, repair 404s, consolidate duplicate URLs, remove unnecessary internal nofollows, and trim bloated nav/footer links that dilute. Then route equity deliberately with contextual links to the pages you want to rank.
Do nofollow links pass link equity?
No, and they do not redirect it either. A nofollowed link's share is not passed to the target and is not redistributed to your other links — it is lost. That is why nofollowing internal links to sculpt authority stopped working; it destroys equity rather than concentrating it.
Does link equity pass through redirects?
Through a 301, most of it does, which is why redirecting is the right way to consolidate pages. Chains are the problem: each hop is another opportunity to lose a little, and long chains also waste crawl budget. Point internal links at the final URL rather than relying on the redirect.
Do links in the navigation pass link equity?
They do, but very little per link, because a sitewide element linking to dozens of pages divides what it passes across all of them. Navigation is for reachability; contextual in-body links from focused pages are what move meaningful equity.
Is link juice the same as link equity?
Yes — link juice is the older informal name for the same idea. Both describe ranking power passing between pages through links. Neither is a metric you can look up; they are models for reasoning about how authority moves.
How much equity does a page lose per hop?
The original model used a damping factor of about 0.85, meaning roughly 15% is lost at each step, and modern systems are considerably more nuanced than that. Treat it as a principle rather than a figure: distance costs, so shortening the path from a strong page to an important one is usually worth more than adding another link at the far end.
Does the position of a link on the page affect how much equity it passes?
Yes, and it is one of the larger effects. Links in the main body of a page carry more than links in a sidebar, footer or navigation, which is why a single contextual link can outperform a dozen template ones. Position and surrounding context are part of how a link is weighted, not just how many links share the page.
Can I recover equity from a page I deleted?
Mostly, with a 301 redirect to the closest relevant page — that is the whole reason to redirect rather than let a URL 404. What you cannot recover is equity from a page deleted long ago with no redirect in place, once the external links pointing at it have been dropped from the index.
Does an internal link from a low-authority page still help?
A little, and less than people hope. Every page holds a baseline share, so even a weak page passes something — but a link from a page that itself has real inbound links is worth many from pages nothing points at. When you have limited placements, spend them on strong source pages.
Should I remove internal links to reduce dilution?
Removing genuinely pointless links does strengthen the ones that remain, and it is worth doing to bloated footers and mega-menus. Do not strip useful navigation to chase the arithmetic — a link a reader needs earns its place, and the cost of one extra link on a focused page is small.
Do image links pass link equity?
They do, and the alt text acts as the anchor. An image link with empty alt text passes equity while telling search engines nothing about the destination, which wastes half of what the link was worth. If a linked image is a meaningful navigation element, describe the destination in the alt text.
Put this into practice
Run the Authority Flow Checker to see this on your own site, or run the full structural audit for the complete picture — both free, no account required.