Introduction to Google Juice
October 11, 2008 By: Justin | 14 commentsSo let’s get down and dirty with some higher level SEO. This isn’t too complicated, but more theoretical than “go do this”. Let’s talk about link juice and exactly what is going on when you do linking.
Link juice is an easy way to visualize the concept of website authority and how links pass authority. Imagine a site as a container that holds a fixed amount of authority. This authority could be represented as a volume of liquid. This liquid is “Google Juice“. It is a “volume” of authority that your site and pages hold. Each site has a fixed amount of juice at any given time. Google juice is constantly changing, but we’re taking a “snapshot” to look at it at a particular instance. At this point the site has a set amount and it is distributed through the pages. You could consider pages as cups that hold this link juice. When a page links to another page it creates a connection between the two cups and juice flows out of one and into another. Visually this is the idea of page authority and how that authority is passed from page to page.
A New Site
Once you launch a site and are indexed, you are assigned a minimal amount of juice. It’s enough to get you indexed, but not really enough to rank for any competitive keyword. Once you get links, they start to pass juice to you. The pages on your site start to fill up and your site as a whole fills up with juice. The image below is a visual representation of this.
The top square represents a new site. The container is blue and the Google Juice is green. As you can see, the site has no links and very little juice. The second set shows linking. Once sites link to this new site, they pass juice to it via links (the arrows). The result is that the site fills up and now has more Google Juice.
Out Going Links
In this “snapshot” example, a page has a finite amount of juice to pass. If it is only linking (out) to one page, it can potentially pass full juice. If that same page links to more pages, it must split the juice that it passes! This is why people say not to look for links with many outgoing links. Here is a brief example.
As you can see in the first set, the site is able to pass a significant amount of juice to each of the pages it links to. In the next set, it is linking to three sites instead of two. Since it can only pass a finite amount of juice, the amount of juice each individual page gets is less! It’s like splitting a pie 12 ways instead of 6!
Link Exchanges
You hear constantly that one-way links are better than two-way link exchanges, but why? We’ll let’s look at the following example.
In the first set of sites, we’re look at a one-way link. The first site is linking directly to the second site. This is passing juice one-way and the second site benefits.
In the second set of sites, they have exchanged links. This time site A is passing juice to site B, but site B is now passing juice to site A. So site A lost juice and site B gained it, but then site B lost some juice and passed it to site A. The net result is that each site has a minor increase in juice. The increase is minor, compared to the increase created by one-way links.
The Role of Link Location
I’m sure you’ve heard that a contextual related link is the best type of link and let’s look at why. Below is a diagram of a traditional blog page. On the right are examples of how much juice would be passed by a link in that location. In this case, the original Google Juice is shown in green and the increase is shown as the same color as the page location.
Google evaluates a link based off its location. If it is placed in a discounted location, it may only be able to receive a percentage of the juice. Links that appear in the “meat” of the site, which is the blog post, is going to receive the most link juice. Google likes solid, organic, contextual links that are related.
Links in the “comment section” and “side bar”, which are shown in blue and light gray respectively, are discounted zones. This links count, but much less than a contextual link. So although dofollow comment links and blogroll links help, they do not have the same effect as contextual links.
Footer links, which appear at the bottom, are generally highly discounted. These links are unnatural and not organic. If a link appears here, it is usually a “designed by” link, some form of credit, an SEO link, or a paid link.
Sculpting PageRank with Google Juice
If you’ve been in SEO for a while, you’ve heard of PR sculpting. If you’re new, it’s pretty simple. As you know, links act as channels through which Google Juice can flow. If you block this channel, you can horde the juice into that cup (webpage). This extra juice can now be redistributed through your site.
It is important to know that Google juice not only flows from site to site, but can flow from page to page within a site! You have a set volume of juice in your site and each page is a cup, but the cups can have different amounts. You can change these amounts by turning on and off the channels, which will block the flow of juice.
So how do we block it? Nofollow! =P
Nofollow is basically a dam for that link and blocks juice from flowing. Let’s look at an example.
This is a “normal” site with no PageRank sculpting activities. As you can see juice flows down from the index, which is the primary level, down to the secondary level, which is usually category type pages, down to the tertiary level, which are usually individual pages.
You can see examples of things we’ve mentioned previously. Looking at the tertiary level from left to right. The first is getting great juice because it is the only page getting a link from its secondary page. The second and third pages, from left to right, are getting less juice because their secondary page is passing out three links. So this juice is now split three ways. The forth page has more juice because it is getting links from two different secondary pages. The fifth page is getting good juice, but less than page one because it’s secondary page is passing out two links.
This is a very simplistic way to look at the distribution of Google Juice on a site. Next we’re going to look at what effect nofollows have on this distribution. Below is an example.
In this example we have nofollowed two of the links off the home page (in red). The result is that no juice is being passed via those links. Those pages, and the pages that receive juice from those pages, have significantly less juice! The result is that two secondary pages and two tertiary pages have little to no juice.
It is important to understand: THE VOLUME OF JUICE DID NOT CHANGE!
The site still has the same amount of juice. The juice that was in the now empty pages must now be passed to other pages. More juice collects in the index, which allows the one secondary page to receive a significant increase in Google Juice. This allows the three middle tertiary pages to receive more juice! Pages one and five, from left and right, will now have a harder time ranking, but pages two, three, and four will now have more juice to obtain their desired rankings!
So That’s What’s Happening!
I hope that I explained that well. That’s kind of what is happening when you get links. It’s a little too high level for some, but don’t worry. All this results in is “go get links”. I think it’s good to understand the why behind what I’m doing because I can better evaluate links. What is actually happening at Google is a massive probability calculation, but this is a much easier way to “visualize” what is happening. I hope that helps. I haven’t done a post like this in a while, that was fun =P
Thanks for reading.
Filed Under SEO |
Tagged With google juice, link juice, links, SEO
Related PostsInfuse Your Back Links With Sweet Sweet Juice
So I just put up a post where I talked about diminishing marginal utility of links from the same IP. Basically, there is a limiting factor to how much juice
Internal Linking & Site Depth
SEO Lesson on how to improve your sites structure by linking internally and reducing your sites “depth”. They will improve improve Google’s ability to crawl your site while providing more
Google PageRank & Links For SEO Explained
Because of the Google PR update, its a great time to discuss PR and links. Here is a Quick PR and Link SEO lesson. We cover PR basics and give
SEO Basics
Learn about how Google ranks a site. Lesson covers basic Google algorithm theory and outlines the most important factors used by search engines when determining rank.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link
SEO BANS Template
SEO Zombie reworks the default BANS (Build A Niche Store) Template to improve its search engine optimization. This is a free BANS template that has a few SEO changes that
Comments
14 Comments »
Trackback responses to this post
Subscribe
Search
Get Started
Learn SEO
Search Engine Optimization Guide
Build A Niche Store
Free BANS Template
BANS Template Modifications
.info BANS
Sneaky SEO
Link Laundering
Link Exchanges
Find Dofollow Blogs
Referer Spam
SEO Footprint
Popular
Categories
- BANS
- Bloggers
- Blogging
- Case Study
- Keywords
- Link Building
- Make Money Online
- Nashville
- Online Success
- Podcasts
- Search Engines
- SEO
- SEO Lessons
- SEO Wordpress Themes
- SEO Zombie
- Sneaky
- Social Marketing
- Tools
- Video
- Wordpress
I have question - is blocking indexing of categories/tags pages with robots.txt equal to nofollowing them for passing link juice?
noindex meta and robots.txt does not prevent the page from accumulating page rank. external links can still point to blocked pages.
the nofollow attribute is more about preventing internal links from pointing to it.
A page can accumulate pagerank, even if it isn’t indexed
This is also a good example of what to look for in building quality links back to a particular page or site. I love quick blog finder because it gives you a rough idea of how many links or leaving the page in addition to do or don’t follow links.
Good diagrams and useful info for building up your links.
That was a really easy to follow explanation of linking and Google Juice (any idea who coined that term? It always makes me giggle)
Great explanation. This is definitely an important issue so we don’t lose focus on what is really important when it comes to linking and ranking.
How do you verify this conclusion, especially “The Role of Link Location”? I mean it does make sense and sound logical but how do you know it’s a fact? Personal experience? Word of mouth? Experiments?
It’s a little bit of different things. It is general knowledge at this point. I’ve seen it as well on several of my sites. If you use dofollow blogs for link building, you’ll quickly notice that PR 5 dofollow comment links don’t pass the same juice as a PR 5 contextual link.
There is also a research paper published by MSN talking about visual evaluation of a webpage. It can be found here:
http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?type=Technical%20Report&id=690
In the document you find a visual that outlines segments of a webpage and gives them scores.
Hey I just noticed you are showing up on page 2 for the key term “SEO”, from my data center at least. Good job.
Sweet! Good to hear =)
I’m showing up at the very top of page 3 on my DC. I’ve been bouncing around page 3 for a while. With a little push, I could prob get a solid ranking on page 2
Ok, I have a couple quick questions. Can you get your site reported for having a bunch of links from article marketing? Aren’t those considered spam type links? Are you doing article marketing for the first page of your site, or deep links?
Great article and diagrams on how the juice is flowing. One question though, does juice flow to image files that are embedded in a post. For example if I click on one of your diagrams in the above post, it is linked to and brings me to the actual jpeg image. Because those images are linked from the main post, do they get juice? If so, does it make sense to no-follow them? Or does it make more sense to leave them do-follow so that they get indexed by Google’s image search?
I think it’d be helpful, at least for me, to have an article that covers how Google treats images in terms of SEO. What do you think? :)
Justin,
Your use of simple diagrams and analogy makes it easier to understand about link building. Getting Google juice is after all something which all of us are constantly doing. Thanks for visiting my blog.
Peter Lee