External Linking & Your sites Link juice
-
Hey guys, quick question. Does a page lose link juice when it gives link juice? If I link to an outside site, do I lose that same amount of link juice or is it just applied to there site and not removed from mine? I understand that linking to a competitor can in turn help him and hurt me (if he then is seen as more relevant than me to google) but does it have a direct relation to hurting/removing my page link juice? Hope this all makes sense. Thanks
-
Common perception is that "nofollow" links still deplete your link juice, but the other site does not benefit.
That being said, there is no correlated data saying that linking to high quality sites will hinder your rankings (if done in moderation, and properly). In fact, the correlation is very minutely in the positive. So, if you think something is good enough to send your customers to, just let the link go free. My only suggestion would be to control your anchor text, and make sure it's not something you would wank to rank for. Ultra safe scenario would be to link with their brand name.
-
Yes, when you link to another site you are passing some of your link juice to them. You can add a nofollow attribute (i.e. rel="nofollow">example link ) to your outgoing links to stop this from happening, but its looked down upon. If you do this within your own site too much this can also be interpreted by Google as page sculpting (another thing frowned upon). I like to think of the thought behind your question as link karma. Next time you post something worthwhile someone may do the same when linking to you. Is that something you really want? If the content is actually worth linking to then you should throw them the link. In the long run if your page is really of value this shouldn't affect your ranking. In some cases, Google even appears to like it when you link to trusted and valuable sources.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Mobile site ranking instead of/as well as desktop site in desktop SERPS
I have just noticed that the mobile version of my site is sometimes ranking in the desktop serps either instead of as well as the desktop site. It is not something that I have noticed in the past as it doesn't happen with the keywords that I track, which are highly competitive. It is happening for results that include our brand name, e.g '[brand name][search term]'. The mobile site is served with mobile optimised content from another URL. e.g wwww.domain.com/productpage redirects to m.domain.com/productpage for mobile. Sometimes I am only seen the mobile URL in the desktop SERPS, other times I am seeing both the desktop and mobile URL for the same product. My understanding is that the mobile URL should not be ranking at all in desktop SERPS, could we be being penalised for either bad redirects or duplicate content? Any ideas as to how I could further diagnose and solve the problem if you do believe that it could be harming rankings?
Technical SEO | | pugh0 -
Site rebuild without HTML extension = broken links?
I have a client and his site is pure HTML. He made huge amount of link building with some hundreds of links point to example.com/target.HTML Now we decided to use WordPress with the same site structure. If we use the exact same URLs but without the HTML ending will it cause broken links? Is there any best practice for this kind of change? Many thanks for any idea!
Technical SEO | | seozoltan0 -
What I doing wrong when trying to search for links from external websites to my website
This is just the little frustrating question nothing important but I’m sure somebody will know the answer. In the white board Friday this week Rand suggested at one point that when you’re searching for results links to your website if you put a - followed by site followed by your url like –site:yourwebsite.com you get the results of pages with links on other websites but excluding your own webpages but it just doesn’t work I get no results just an error message, any idea why? If I remove the - I get tons of results but there on my own webpages……….
Technical SEO | | whitbycottages0 -
How do you take down a link
Salut from Sunny wetherby UK 🙂 Having just watched a whiteboard fri clip all about the "Penguin Update" i want to know how to take down a link. I feel a site ive been working on has been pecked by the penguin. I did build inbound links on a specific commercial term and shiver me timbers is dropped oof the SERPS from top 5 to ziltch, yiles!! So my questiuon is please:
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
if you find an inbound link using a target term how do you kill it? Thanks in advance :_)0 -
301 Redirect & Linking Root Domain Count
Howdy Mozzers! If I do a 301 redirect from a domain that say has 200 linking root domains, to a fresh domain will the fresh domain now (when updated) have a linking root domain count of 200? Also, is it beneficial or detrimental to do a 301 redirect for an unrelated website i.e. garden hose website, to a children's playgorund equipment website in order to capture the link juice? Best
Technical SEO | | clickfactory0 -
Diagnostic says too many links on a page and most of the pages are from blog entries. Are tags considered links? How do I decrease links?
I just ran my first diagnostic on my site and the results came back were negative in the area of too many links one a page. There were also quite a few 404 errors. What is the best way to fix these problems? Most of the pages with too many links are from blog posts, are the tags counted as well and is this the reason for too many links?
Technical SEO | | Newport10300 -
Website Structure - What works best for passing the Link Juice?
As most people know it's usual that the main menu is after the top right small links in html. My questions are: What is more important for google or how does google tell which link is more important than the other to pass juice on? If the top right links are in front of the main menu in html would they get more link juice than the main menu? Should i focus in working on better html structure but still keeping the same look ( reverse the html code but keep the same look through css)? Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | mosaicpro0 -
Will using https across our entire site hurt our external backlinks?
Our site is secured throughout, so it loads sitewide as https. It is canonicalized properly - any attempt to load an existing page as http will force to https. My concern is with backlinks. We've put a lot of effort into social media, so we're getting some nice blog linkage. The problem is that the links are generally to http rather than https (understandable, since that's the default for most web users). The site still loads with no problem, but my concern is that since a redirect doesn't transfer all the link juice across, we're leaking some perfectly good link credit. From the standpoint of backlinkage, are we harming ourselves by making the whole site secure by default? The site presently isn't very big, but I'm looking at adding hundreds of new pages to the site, so if we're going to make the change, now is the time to do so. Let me know what you think!
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0