One of my favorite comedy bits is Lewis Black educating us on the difference between milk and water. Black tells us that there is no such thing as soy milk because soy beans do not have breasts (from which milk comes). Soy milk is a made-up name to sell a product.

“Link juice” – a term made up by Greg Boser, president of BlueGlass Interactive – is a misrepresentation of a small part of what used to be and is no longer a significant component of PageRank. Don’t believe me? Look up “link juice” in Wikipedia and you’re redirected to the SEO page.

Over the years, the term has been used by the SEO community to mislead clients into thinking that Google is able to monitor a flow of authority status between sites – status that diminishes in proportion to the number of links on the page.

Even when the Web was a mere 15 million pages, this would have been quite a feat. At its current trillion-plus page level, however, the ability to monitor anything across the entire Web defies logic. More importantly, we no longer need SEO-binkies like link juice to legitimize our craft. Link juice has to go and here’s why.

Link juice is SEO pixie dust

The SEO community latched on to the term early on as a poor substitute for what turns out to be a complex part of the PageRank algorithm. Search results for “link juice” on any search engine produce reams and reams of self-referential fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) from various SEO practitioners who lack a clear understanding of the Hilltop Algorithm. This algorithm introduced the concept of authority status for certain pages based on links from other authority pages on the same subject.

The closest Google has come to acknowledging something that looks like link juice is from front man Matt Cutts: “Probably the most popular way to envision PageRank is as a flow that happens between documents across outlinks” (Matt Cutts’ blog, June 15, 2009). Even Rand Fiskin at Moz backs away from the juice flow element of links: “… the idea of a ‘leak’ of juice through adding additional links to a page may not be accurate (at least, according to the original Google PR formula)…”

Authority and not the juicy kind

From the get-go, PageRank was a flawed model due to Larry Page’s assumption that Web citations would be as altruistically awarded as research citations in academia. Not so for a commercialized Web.

Even the inclusion of a Random Surfer dampening factor could not deter the SEO community from “gaming” the PageRank system early on. This began the Road Runner/Wiley Coyote relationship between the search engines and the SEO community.

1. Google launches an update that includes the Hilltop Algorithm and introduces the concept of page authority. SEO community responds with refined link acquisition schemes from search engine-defined “expert” sites.
2. Google refines Hilltop with Topic Sensitive PageRank that augments PageRank with the capacity to match the topicality between pages, e.g. authority within a certain concept area. SEO community responds with content farms and publishing thin content on trending search topics.
3. Google launches Caffeine, a complete shift in how Google crawls and indexes the Web. No more monthly dances. Lackluster response from SEO community who does not care about indexing or dancing for that matter.
4. February 2010 gets off to a Le Mans start when J.C. Penney and Overstock.co are outed by a competitor for mind-blowingly egregious link acquisition and parasite hosting schemes. An extremely peeved Google responds with an early release of the Panda update, the first ginormous step away from a link-based relevance model to one that is user experience-based. Evidently they are sensitive when an international publication like the New York Times exposes their lack of complete control over the Web and search results.  Who knew? The SEO Community FREAKS OUT as websites plummet from ranking for no apparent reason. OK, crappy thin content that searchers don’t like is the reason but who wants to admit to that? There is much hysteria as some SEOs try to find a user experience professional to talk to. The powers that be down in Mountain View do the happy dance.
5. Google puts the final stake in the link-driven relevance model with Penguin. The SEO community is gob smacked and unable to come up with a workaround better than bended knee pleading to be re-included in Google’s index. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, a cottage industry of bended knee re-inclusion experts emerges.
6. Just to make sure the link-based vampire is really dead, Google shuts off any keyword referral information from Google Analytics (KAPOW!) and launches Hummingbird, a diabolical turn towards query reformulation, semantic mapping, and content strategy. Completely baffled, the SEO community talks among itself about the impact of Hummingbird while still trying to figure out the pizza place/restaurant example that Google used in the announcement. Even if link juice were real (which it isn’t), the now desiccated corpse of links no longer has juice.

Let’s put away our SEO binkies

We don’t need to make up stuff to make ourselves sound legit. SEO is a known and highly desired service. We do need to start reaching across silos and working with our user experience and content strategy brethren because optimizing websites is now a team effort.

There is no such thing as link juice. There is page authority – of which links are a part of a long list of contributors.  And, while we are getting used to a link juice-less world, let’s put keyword optimization on that boat. It is not about keywords any more. It’s about concepts and context.

And let’s ditch the too-many-links-on-the-page-bleeding-link-juice chestnut. The search engines are all over that. In their yearly conference on Adversarial Information Retrieval (IR), they have discussed this and now designate global and footer navigation links as nepotistic links, recognize them as spam, and ignore them.

Let’s banish link juice from the lexicon of SEO.  Like the binkies of our childhood, we don’t need it anymore.  Caffeine, Panda, and the most recent Hummingbird infrastructure changes have brought about a more dynamic, contextual, and semantic search landscape.  We have a lot of work ahead of us.

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I want to discuss

1. What is PageRank?
2. What is a nofollow link?
3. The old Google behavior
4. The new Google behavior
5. SEO Options and recommendations

What is PageRank?

PageRank,called link juice by some, is a signal created by and measured by search engine results ranking algorithms. This is the foundation of Google’s original rankings algorithm and one of the three pillars of SEO (content, site architecture and links). In simple terms, every link is a vote. A link (vote) from a page that itself has lots of links or has links from highly trusted pages possesses more influence than a link (vote) from a page with only a few links or links from low-authority pages. PageRank can come from internal and external links.

PageRank is reusable. PageRank does not disappear after a search engine weighs a page’s authority. Instead, the receiving page passes much of its PageRank onto the pages that it links to. It passes 1/n of the PageRank to each document the page links to, n being is the number of document being linked to. Because of this nature, we can control the flow of PageRank to boost important pages and promote the indexing of deep content by search engines.

What is a NoFollow Link?

Google and other search engines prefer it when websites do not pass authority to other websites if

1. The link is a paid advertisement or insertion

2. The author or website administrators are unsure about the quality of a web page being linked to

Telling webmasters to not create these links would be unacceptable requirement. Yet, these types of links pollute the search engines’ ranking algorithms. As a band-aid, the search engines created the nofollow tag to keep links in place, but without passing PageRank.

This is how a nofollow tag is placed into a link’s HTML markup:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.examplecompanysite.com” target=”_blank”>Anchor Text</a>

PageRank Sculpting

PageRank sculpting is an advanced SEO technique used by 3% of web sites. Google web spam team member Matt Cutts has confirmed that, “…you are allowed to control how the PageRank flows around within your site,” and, “…if you have a certain amount of budget of PageRank, you certainly can sculpt your PageRank.” Advanced websites did exactly that.

In large part, PageRank determines how often Google crawls your web site, how many pages it crawls and how many pages it indexes. Every document has a limited amount of PageRank that it can pass. As PageRank is repeatedly passed from page to page it diminishes. Eventually, without external backlinks to refill the tank, PageRank runs out.

Because PageRank is a scarce resource, what you link to becomes important. Even Google’s Matt Cutts suggests that web designers use internal link architecture strategically. For example, from the home page you should link to product pages with good ROI and not to pages that do not sell well.

Many sites do not adhere to a search engine friendly internal link architecture. Instead, designers want to design for people. They frequently use drop-down menus, spider menus or on-page menus to link to every possible category, sub-category and content page believing that this will create a better user experience for their human visitors.

Did you know that a designer’s desire to make every important page immediately available to readers can be counter to people’s normal scan-click-refine web browsing behavior?

To counter this tangle of links, SEO strategists will nofollow links that do not adhere to good architecture to stop them from wasting PageRank.

Google’s Old Behavior

Google allows webmasters to choose which links pass PageRank and which do not. The most common method for controlling PageRank flow–also known as sculpting PageRank and Link Juice irrigation–was to use nofollow tags like irrigation gates. When the tag is present the gate is closed causing more PageRank to flow through those links with no nofollow tags.

Google’s New Behavior

At this month’s SMX Advanced conference, Matt Cutts stated, then later confirmed that using the nofollow tag will not conserve and redirect PageRank. Instead it “evaporates” PageRank. The authority disappears.

This is important because

1. Pages into which webmasters push additional PageRank will no longer receive those boosts.
2. Popular pages with user-generated content, such as blog comments, could become vulnerable. Traditionally blogs link to each comment writer’s website. Now, every new comment and link will dilute PageRank a little more. This can happen in forums and wikis and other types of user-generated content too.

SEO Options and Recommendations

The best option for controlling the flow of PageRank is to employ good web page and internal link architecture. Here is one example.

1. Navigation
   • The home page links to category pages
   • Category pages link their sub-category pages
   • Category pages link to other category pages but not other category sub-pages
   • Subcategory pages link to content pages within the sub-category
   • Subcategory pages link to other subcategory pages within the same category and to the category page
   • Content pages link to the parent sub-category page and the parent category page
   • All pages link to the home page
2. Content – Link to any page as is appropriate to the context of your content and link to high ROI pages you want to give an extra boost to
3. Websites should not extend beyond five levels of depth, including the home page as level 1. Every page should be within four clicks of the home page along a breadcrumb path (Unless your website is huge)

The more trust and authority your site has, or the more PageRank you have, the more liberal you can be with your internal linking.

As far as we know it is still permissible to control the flow of PageRank and this can be accomplished by some of the same methods which were popular before the introduction of the nofollow tag. For example, links can be placed in iFrames. An iFrame is web page or web markup snippet that one can insert into a web page. When you disallow an iFrame file in robots.txt its links pass no PageRank.

I’m not going to go into all the different methods for sculpting PageRank. You should know that Google is now reading Javascript and Flash links, so you will probably want to try something different. Finally, we do not recommend methods that could be described as cloaking, such as polling whether or not cookies are enabled before displaying links. People and search engines should receive the same versions of your web pages.

As for combating the dilution of PageRank in user-generated content like blog comments, we recommend a wait and see approach. Frequent comments are a signal of quality and search engines will not want to punish content that receives lots of comments. Otherwise, sites like TechCrunch would lose their rankings. Expect an announcement from Google to clarify this.

Image by Neil Cummings

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