What Is Link Equity, and How Does It Actually Move?

Link equity is the ranking value that passes from one page to another through a link. It is a model, not a quantity — there is no field anywhere that reads “this page holds 41 units of equity.” Understanding the model is still worth an hour of your time, because almost every sensible piece of link advice is a consequence of it, and almost every scam is a misreading of it.

Older writing calls this “link juice.” That phrase is why so many people picture a tank of fluid being poured between websites, which leads directly to the two most expensive mistakes in the field: believing equity can be bought in bulk, and believing you can hoard it. Neither follows from the model. Let’s build the model properly instead.

Where the idea comes from

The original insight behind Google’s PageRank was that you can estimate a page’s importance by imagining someone browsing the web at random: they land on a page, pick one of its links, follow it, pick another, and so on forever. Pages that this imaginary reader ends up on more often are more important. Since the reader arrives at a page only via links pointing at it, importance accumulates through the link graph.

That is the whole intuition, and two consequences fall straight out of it.

First, a link from an important page is worth more, because the random reader is more likely to be standing there in the first place. This is the “votes weighted by the credibility of the voter” idea from our explainer on what a backlink is.

Second, the value a page passes is divided among the links it contains. Our imaginary reader picks one link, so a page with a handful of outbound links sends a meaningful share down each; a page with hundreds sends a sliver down each. This is the part that “link juice” language obscures, and it explains a great deal — why a link from a curated page beats a link from a directory listing thousands of sites, why footer links repeated across an entire site are treated differently from a link inside an article, and why scraped pages stuffed with outbound links are worth approximately nothing to their targets.

Modern search engines do not run 1998’s algorithm. But the shape of the model — value accumulates through links, weighted by source and divided among destinations — is still the right mental picture.

What makes one link carry more than another

Stacking the ideas above with what search engines have said publicly, four things govern how much a link carries:

• The strength of the linking page. Not the domain in the abstract — the specific page. A link from a homepage that everyone references is not the same as a link from an unvisited archive page on the same site.
• How many other links share that page. Division is real. A short, deliberate reference list is a better neighbourhood for your link than a wall of outbound links.
• Whether the link is eligible to pass anything at all. A link can be annotated to say “don’t treat this as an endorsement,” which changes what it means — see nofollow, sponsored, and UGC.
• Context and relevance. The surrounding text, the anchor text, and the topical fit between the two pages all inform what the link is evidence of. A link is not a generic power-up; it is testimony about a subject.

Notice that nothing in that list is a number you can look up. Which brings us to the honest part.

You cannot measure it

Every vendor score you have seen — domain-level or page-level — is a proxy built from a crawl of the web that the vendor did themselves, using a formula they do not publish. Those scores are useful for comparing candidates, and they correlate with the thing we are describing, but they are not measurements of link equity. Nobody outside a search engine has the graph, the weights, or the tuning.

So treat the model the way a plumber treats water pressure without a gauge: it tells you which direction things flow and what will obviously go wrong. It will never give you a figure to put in a slide.

If you ever see a specific percentage attached to link equity — how much a link passes, how much a redirect loses, how much a nofollow costs you — treat it as folklore. Those numbers are not published, and the people quoting them did not measure them either.

Equity moves through your own site too

The model does not stop at your front door. Value that arrives on one of your pages flows onward through your internal links, which has a practical consequence most site owners underuse: a page nobody on your own site links to is a page you have chosen to starve. If a guide is important to you, it should be reachable from the pages that already earn attention, not buried three clicks deep in an archive.

The same model explains why a moved or deleted URL matters. The links pointing at the old address were carrying something; whether that keeps arriving depends on how the move was configured, which is a technical plumbing question rather than a link-strategy one and is out of scope here. The strategy-level rule is simply: do not casually change or retire URLs that other people have already linked to. We cover the editorial side of that in how to update a page people have already cited.

Four misreadings worth unlearning

1. “Equity is a currency I can buy.” Paid links that pass equity are, by definition in Google’s spam policies, a link scheme. The model does not include a legitimate purchase path, which is the subject of earning links without buying them.
2. “I should hoard it by nofollowing my outbound links.” Trying to sculpt where your equity goes by suppressing your own citations is a decade-old tactic that never worked as advertised, and it makes your writing worse. Link to your sources like a normal writer.
3. “More links means more equity, linearly.” Ten links from one site are largely one signal. Search tools report referring domains separately from raw link counts precisely because the second number flatters you.
4. “Equity is the only thing a link does.” A link also sends actual readers, gets your page discovered, and puts your name in front of people who write things. A nofollowed mention in a widely read publication can be worth far more than a dofollow link nobody sees.

The useful version of all this

The model reduces to a short list of behaviours: publish pages that give people a reason to reference you, keep the addresses of those pages stable, link internally to the work you actually care about, and stop trying to acquire value that only means anything when it is given freely. Why a specific page attracts references in the first place is the subject of why one page earns links and another doesn’t.

Link equity is a lens, not a ledger. Use it to explain what you are seeing, never to promise a number.