Link equity is the ranking value a link passes from the page it sits on to the page it points to. When a respected industry site links to your guide, some of the value Google sees in that industry page flows through the link to your guide and can help it rank.

The idea comes from PageRank. Google's original ranking system treated every page as having a share of importance, and divided that importance among the links on the page [1]. A page with a lot of importance and few links passes a lot through each link. A page with little importance, or a great many links, passes little through each.

"Link equity" is industry language, not a Google term. SEOs also call it "link juice". Google itself talks about PageRank and link analysis [3].

Link equity works by splitting a page's value among the links on that page. Matt Cutts of Google gave the simplest version in 2009: a page with nine points of PageRank and three outgoing links passes three points along each link [2].

The full PageRank model adds a damping factor. It imagines a surfer clicking random links who, at each step, keeps clicking with a probability usually set around 0.85 [1]. In practice this means value fades as it passes through chains of links, so a link two steps removed from a strong page carries less than a direct link from it.

Three points shape how much equity any one link passes:

  • The strength of the linking page. A page that itself has many good links passes more.
  • How many links the page has. Cutts confirmed that "most of the time the number of links do matter" [2]. A link among 10 gets a bigger share than a link among 300.
  • Google's own judgment. Cutts also stated that Google "solely decides how much PageRank will flow to each and every link on a particular page" [2]. Links are not weighed as perfectly equal shares.

Yes. Google's guide to its ranking systems says PageRank was one of its core ranking systems when Google first launched, and that "how PageRank works has evolved a lot since then" [3]. Google also states that it uses links as a signal of relevance and to find new pages [4].

What Google does not do is publish the number. It removed PageRank data from Webmaster Tools on October 15, 2009, last updated the public Toolbar PageRank in November 2013, and turned the Toolbar display off on April 15, 2016 [1]. Every "link equity" figure you see today is a third-party estimate, not Google's value.

No published Google guidance says the number of folders in a URL reduces the link equity a page receives or passes. The widely repeated claim that a link from example.com/blog/2024/05/topic/post is worth less than one from example.com/post, simply because of the slashes, mixes up two different things.

  • URL depth is how many folders appear in the address. Google's URL structure guidance is about readable words, hyphens and avoiding endless parameter variations. It does not describe folder depth as a ranking or link value signal [5].
  • Click depth is how many links it takes to reach a page from the homepage or other strong pages. This one does matter for link equity, because each step through PageRank loses value to the damping factor and gets split among more links [1].

The two often go together on badly organized sites, which is why the myth survives. A page buried in deep folders is often also buried in navigation. But a page at a long URL that is linked from the homepage and from many articles can receive plenty of equity, and a page at a short URL that nothing links to receives almost none. The PageRank model contains links and nothing else; the text of the URL plays no part in it [1].

For link buyers, the practical version: judge a link by how well linked the page it sits on is, not by how many slashes are in its address. See click depth.

Link equity is reduced by link attributes that withhold endorsement, by crowded pages, and by spam signals.

  • Nofollow, sponsored and ugc. A nofollow link asks Google not to pass value. Google now treats these values as hints, so a nofollowed link may or may not pass anything.
  • Many outbound links on the page. Each extra link takes a share [2].
  • Nofollow on other links on the same page. Since a change Google made more than a year before June 2009, nofollowed links still take their share of the page's value, but that share is lost rather than passed to the remaining links [2].
  • Spam. Google's link spam policy covers links created primarily to manipulate rankings, including paid links that don't block ranking credit, excessive link exchanges and low-quality directory links [6]. Since September 23, 2016, Penguin generally discounts such links, meaning it ignores them [7].
  • Redirect chains and broken pages. If the linked page returns an error, the link points nowhere useful.

Link equity is the value a single link passes, while Domain Rating is Ahrefs' score for a whole website's link profile. Link equity is a concept about Google's link analysis; Domain Rating is a vendor metric calculated from Ahrefs' own crawl [8].

The two diverge often. A high-DR website can host a brand-new page with no internal or external links, and a link from that page passes very little. Ahrefs itself says DR does not account for link spam [8], so a high-DR site built on spam links may hold little real equity in Google's eyes.

What is the difference between link equity and link juice?

There is no difference. "Link juice" is the informal name for link equity. Both describe the ranking value passed through links.

Google's handling of link equity has moved from a published, equal-split model toward a private system that judges links individually. The core idea, that links pass value, has stayed constant since 1996 [1].

1996: PageRank is developed

Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed PageRank at Stanford in 1996, and the patent was granted on September 4, 2001 [1].

2005: nofollow lets sites withhold equity

Google introduced the nofollow value in early 2005 so site owners could mark links that should not count for PageRank [1].

2008 to 2009: sculpting stops working

Some SEOs used nofollow on their own internal links to push equity toward chosen pages. In June 2009, Matt Cutts revealed that Google had changed this more than a year earlier: nofollowed links now consumed their share and that share evaporated [2]. See internal link sculpting.

2012 to 2016: Penguin discounts manipulative links

Penguin launched on April 24, 2012, against link schemes. From September 23, 2016 it ran in real time inside the core algorithm and discounted bad links instead of demoting whole sites [7].

2016: the public number disappears

Toolbar PageRank was switched off on April 15, 2016 [1]. Link equity has been invisible to site owners ever since.

You cannot measure link equity directly, because Google does not publish it. What you can measure are proxies:

  • Third-party page scores such as Ahrefs URL Rating estimate the strength of a specific page. Prefer page-level scores to domain-level ones for judging a single link.
  • Internal links to the linking page. A page linked from a site's homepage or main navigation is likely to hold more equity than one reachable only through pagination.
  • Outbound link count on the linking page. Fewer links means a larger share for each [2].
  • Whether the linking page is indexed and ranks for anything. A page Google does not index passes nothing useful.

No tool can tell you how much equity Google actually assigns a link. Treat every number as an estimate.

Earn links from well-linked, relevant pages, then pass that equity on with sensible internal linking.

  • Link from your strongest pages to the pages you want to rank. Your homepage and most-linked articles hold the most equity on your site.
  • Keep important pages within a few clicks of the homepage. Click depth matters; URL depth does not need fixing for its own sake.
  • Don't nofollow your own internal links. It wastes equity rather than redirecting it [2].
  • Fix or redirect broken pages that have backlinks, so the equity they attract reaches a live page.
  • Prefer one link from a page people read over many links from pages nobody visits.