The proverbial “snake oil” – a synonym for misleading promises of miraculous cures to all kinds of diseases – has often been likened to SEO.
In a time when competition is no longer local, but global, proper utilization of digital marketing in its many forms becomes crucial for success.
Yet even in 2022, we see many more #seohorrorstories passed on Twitter and other social media than inspiring success stories.
What is Link Juice and is it bad SEO advice?
Link juice is slang used to describe and measure how much power a backlink passes onto another site and therefore strengthens it.
Mueller from Google was answering a question about outgoing links. He essentially ignored the original question and solely responded to the undesirable “link juice” mention.
While Mueller is usually neutral in his tone this time he came close to a rant on Twitter:
“Anything that talks about ‘link juice’ should be ignored.”
This is nothing new. He’s just reiterating what he expressed in the past more than once.
Here’s a similar quote from his Twitter account back in 2020:
“I’d forget everything you read about ‘link juice.’ It’s very likely all obsolete, wrong, and/or misleading.”
So is link juice such a detestable term?
We won't go too deep into the topic of link juice, as others have done before us. An evergreen guide by WooRank is still worth reading to get a quick overview. Their visualizations are especially self-explanatory.
In theory, the website authority of the site linking out is spread more or less equally to the pages it links to.
But in reality, the process is much more complex and link value depends on many other elements including:
Anchor text (<a href="example.com">I'm the anchor text!</a>): Too many keywords are a red flag, not enough pass less value.
Placement on the page: Footer links count less than content links, for instance.
Context on the site and page: Irrelevant or off-topic context passes less value.
Additional attributes: HTML rel attributes such as rel="nofollow, UGC, sponsored" devalue links.
The number of links: Link lists with dozens of links may not pass any significant value.
What does the all mean?
Google has shifted its messaging to concentrate on quality content and they are really trying to hammer that statement into our heads now. In my opinion, we have to use both links and content into better perspective and be more conscious of how you create copy on a website.
Links are still quite important but it seems like Google really want to focus on website with great content and they are linking to other websites with great content.
Google posted a list of key best practices and content was mentioned 6 times.
Links are still very important but you want to make sure that whoever is building your backlinks are creating content right along with that. Do not purchase X amount of backlinks from people emailing you or contacting you on social media. This is a very bad SEO practice and it can possibly lead to you getting penalizing for having those links. Not only will you be out of money but you could have a decrease in rankings.
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