Don’t Give away your Link Juice!
Have you ever heard someone talk about link juice and you thought to yourself, "What's wrong with that guy?...Link Juice?"
If you have then this is for you.
What that person was talking about is link dilution, let me explain.
When you build/update/post to your website you typically add links into the content and articles that you post. When this new content on your site is indexed and spidered by search engines they rank your page using a few different factors. One factor would be proper Meta info, another would be content, and on down the line. The factor we're explaining here is, linking, the effects of proper linking can be stunning.
Linking can be ranked internally on your website (Menus and links throughout your website that point to your website) and externally (Other websites that point to you and your links pointing to them ). Maintaining your links pointing out of your website is the direct topic here so let's get down to business.
As you build your PageRank on your site you can give that away by linking to another site on that page. It's like spending time filling up a bucket with water and then punching a bunch of holes in it. All of those links are dispersing your PageRank to the other sites that you're pointing your links to. They get the good end of that deal, you just lost PageRank. Why?
...because it's about relevancy. You just told Google with those links in your site that the page your links are pointing to are relevant. All of those keywords and meta tags you optimized are now energizing another sites relevancy.
and then you say.."I've seen ton's of links on other successful sites".
Yes, this is true.
In this scenario what you have could be a few different things. One, the webmaster doesn't know about PageRank and the effects it has on his sites rankings. Two, they're using a nofollow tag to prevent the search equity from bleeding out of their site. Or Three, the sites webmasters have an agreement to link back and forth as a reciprocal agreement to help one another rank in search engines. Go team.
What I suggest to most webmasters is the rel="nofollow" HTML in you links. This gives your users the ability to get to other relevant content from your site, but keeps search bots from giving away your search equity. Once you've established a good relationship with another site in your genre I would also recommend that you link to one another without the nofollow to help one anothers rank. Go team.
Tags: Google, search engine optimization, seo, Link juice, search equity, relevancy, rel nofollow