Link Juice

The underlying idea is that link equity — the SEO value a page accumulates from its own inbound backlinks — can be transmitted to other pages via the links it contains. Every outgoing link on a page shares some portion of that page's authority with the destination. This is why internal linking is a structural SEO decision, not just a navigation choice: a high-authority blog post that links to a product page passes equity from its accumulated backlinks down to a page that might not attract links on its own.

The original PageRank model divided a page's score equally among all outgoing links, minus a damping factor that modeled the probability a random surfer would keep clicking rather than jumping to a new page. A page with significant authority and two outgoing links passes roughly half its score (minus the damping factor) to each destination. The modern implementation is more complex and opaque — Google doesn't publish scores — but the principle holds: pages with more inbound authority have more equity to pass, and distributing that equity through internal links is a real lever.

Several factors affect transmission: nofollow attributes on links traditionally pass no equity (though Google's treatment of nofollow has evolved to a hint rather than a directive); redirect chains reduce equity at each hop; and link placement affects strength — a link buried in a footer or generic "related articles" block passes less than a contextual inline link in relevant body copy. The total number of outgoing links on the source page also matters: the equity gets divided, so a page with 300 outgoing links is a weaker individual equity source than a page with 10.

The practical implication is that internal link architecture determines how authority flows through your site. If your highest-authority pages link to your most commercially important pages, those pages benefit from pooled equity. If your authority is concentrated in archived or orphaned pages that link nowhere useful, the equity sits there doing nothing. Periodic internal link audits — checking whether your strongest content is pointing toward the pages you need to rank — are the mechanism for moving equity where it matters.