Drink Link Juice for Healthy Rankings
March 19th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized
Every morning, we all wake up out of bed with dry mouths and an extreme thirst. We think we’re craving water, orange juice, or maybe even a diet coke (yum!), but what we’re really thirsting for is a cold, fresh, tall glass of link juice.
“We’re just thirsting for a cold, fresh, tall glass of link juice.”
What is link juice?
It’s a way cooler name than “Pass through Ratio” (PTR) dubbed by Google’s head of search, Matt Cutts. Link juice is the amount of PageRank that is being passed along to you when you get a link. If you get a link from a web page with a PageRank of 5, you’re getting 5 glasses of link juice, as long as you’re the only link on the page. But then again, when was the last time you saw a webpage with only 1 link? Never.
Linkjuice in not-so-nerdy terms
How far will you go to get it?
Have you ever seen the movie Juice, with Tupac? You know Matt Cutts probably didn’t, but Juice means power and respect. Tupac played the character named Bishop, who had all of the juice throughout this movie because he was such a tough drug dealer and killer. No one would mess with him, until his former best friend Q pushed him over a roof at the end of a movie, which ended with some random guy telling Q, “Yo, you got the juice now, man.”
“Juice means power and respect.”
Since Tupac is no longer with us, let’s talk Juice in terms of another powerful celebrity, Paris Hilton.
Paris Hilton Loves Giving Links
Whenever you hear Paris talk in an interview, she’s always shouting out different hot spots she frequents around the world. She loves giving out offline links, but let’s say Paris Hilton is on Jay Leno, and she mentions 5 hot nightclubs in LA during her interview with Jay. Paris mentions:
- Avalon
- Basque
- Circle Bar
- Gabah
- and Joseph’s Café
Paris spread her juice (respect) among 5 different nightclubs…that sounded kinda nasty, but read on.
Chances are, you’ll remember a few of those clubs that she mentioned, and you may even check them out. But what if Paris, during her interview, only mentioned 1 of those night clubs…Circle Bar. Wouldn’t you remember Circle Bar even more now? Now Circle Bar gets even more juice (respect).
“What if Paris only spread her juice on one nightclub, instead of 5…”
That’s how link juice works…the more links on a page, the less juice they’re all getting…the less links on a page, the more link juice they are getting. Here’s a graph in case you’re an idiot and still don’t get it:
“The more links per page, the less juice each gets.”
Linkjuice in action
We (Branding Brand) got an awesome link from our Alma Mater, Carnegie Mellon University. The page that is linking to us is called “Branding a Winner” and it’s about how we won some big time award from the Public Relations Society of America. This is a very valuable link because of the following:
- PageRank > 5
- # of TOTAL links on this page > 26
- # of links within page copy > 3
So How much link juice are we getting?
There’s no exact science to this (it’s all part of Google’s algorithm), but based on what Matt Cutts says, there are two ways you can judge this:
- # of TOTAL links on this page > 26: This means we’re getting about 3.8% of the Juice of a PageRank of 5, which means a very small glass of link juice at .19. We’re sharing the link juice with links on the 3 different navigation bars, the footer and the links within the copy.
- # of links within page copy > 3: This means we’re getting a lot more link juice than the example above. Word on the street is that this is what Google really looks at. There are 3 links within the copy:
- one going to us
- one going to College Prowler (the first company we started)
- and the other link going to Carnegie Mellon Today, a magazine for alumni run by our good friend Robert Mendelson.
So, we are getting 33% of the Juice of a PageRank of 5, which means 1.65.
Nofollow
Whoever designed Carnegie Mellon’s website didn’t bother to put “nofollow” tags on links that they didn’t want to pass link juice to. Most people put “nofollow” tags on navigation bar links.
What’s nofollow? It’s a code you use in your HTML that tells Google to not give a link any juice. There are lots of tools out there that can tell you if a website is using this code or you can just “view source” on the page you’re looking at and do a FIND for “nofollow.”
P.S. nofollow was designed for people that used to post links (spam) on sites like wikipedia, myspace and forums and expected to get link juice from them. Bad spammers!
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Joey Rahimi
Joey is from Manhattan, NY but has been living in Pittsburgh for over 10 years now. He is a die hard Steelers and Knicks fan, and really loves PITT Basketball (Carnegie Mellon is D3). Want content written for your Brand that shows up #1 on Search Engines and brings you new customers? Contact us. |
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