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
- chevron_rightRedirect chains — each hop in A→B→C→D bleeds a little equity. Link directly to the final URL.
- chevron_rightBroken links (404s) — equity sent to a dead page is simply lost; it goes nowhere and comes back as nothing.
- chevron_rightSplit 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).
- chevron_rightNofollow on internal links — tells engines not to pass equity, so the target is starved even though it's reachable.
- chevron_rightDilution — mega-menus and bloated footers spread equity so thinly across hundreds of links that no single target gets a usable share.
- chevron_rightOrphans — pages with no inbound links receive only the baseline; the equity never reaches them at all (orphan pages).
How to concentrate it where it counts
- chevron_rightRoute equity deliberately: contextual links from strong, relevant pages to the targets you want to rank.
- chevron_rightFix 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.
- chevron_rightTrim low-value outbound links on important pages so the equity they pass concentrates on fewer, better targets.
- chevron_rightKeep 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?expand_more
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?expand_more
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?expand_more
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.