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What is Link Equity?

What are Equity Links?

Equity links are value passing links:

  • Followed links
  • 301 permanent redirects.

In other words, equity links are links that pass value from one page (Page A) to the other (Page B).

Why are not all links, equity links?

You can use different kind of techniques to prevent a link from passing value, or link juice to another page:

  • Links with the Nofollow attribute.
  • Links on a page using the meta robots tag (index, nofollow or noindex, nofollow).
  • Links on a page with crawl restrictions, using disallow in the robots.txt file.
  • JavaScript links, invisible for search engine crawlers.
  • Links that point to a 302 redirect before landing on your website.
  • Links that point to a page using a meta refresh redirect before landing on your website.

Internal and external equity links

Equity links can be internal and external links.

The difference between external and internal links:

  • External links, are links pointing from another domain (external website) to a page on your website. For example, somewebsite.com is linking to yourwebiste.com/products/.
  • Internal links, are links pointing to pages inside your website. For example, yourwebiste.com/products/ is linking to yourwebiste.com/product-a/.

How to determine the value of a link?

The value of a link, and the potential impact it can have on search engine rankings, is not only determined by the fact it is an equity link or not.

  • External links from relevant and important sites have a bigger impact than internal links.
  • Does the link pass value (Link equity or No link equity)? No link equity passing links are a common part of the internet and they can provide topic relevancy, relevant traffic and or credibility.
  • Links from unique domains are more important than links from sites that have linked to you before.
  • Links using relevant anchor text are able to pass more keyword focused value. (Anchor text is a very important factor but you have to be careful and preserve a natural backlink profile)
  • Links from trusted high value sites are more important than links coming from new low value sites.
  • Links from inside the content pass more value than links inside the footer or blogroll.
  • A page containing a high number of links will pass less value per link.

Metrics to determine the value of a link:

  • Page Authority
  • Domain Authority
  • Page Rank
  • Domain age (This metric on itself isn’t that important, but it provides the context to interpret the other values).

How to identify high value links?

You can use these tools to identify high value links:

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One thought on “What is Link Equity?

  1. Randy Holland

    Thanks for this information. I’m currently building backlinking strategies, one-link-at-a-time, for several of our long-term SEO clients. My link analysis report displays, among many other factors, Link Equity.

    In the past, I’ve tended to overlook links that have No Link Equity. However, as this article has stated, not all links are created equal. I will now take a closer look at each link’s profile, as a whole, to determine its true value.

    Links that appear, on the surface, to possess no value (No Equity) may actually be an asset to website SEO. So obviously, it’s best to look at the whole profile of a link to find its true value, as it pertains to website SEO.

    Thank you!

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