Link equity refers to one of the basic search engine ranking factors that are based on the thesis that certain links pass their value and authority from one page to another. Accordingly, it is one of the main signals to search engines to estimate the webpage’s ranking in SERP.
The link equity is based on different factors, including:
- page authority
- topical relevance
- HTTP status
- current page ranking
- domain authority
- domain age
There are various options of how SEO specialists can improve link equity. For instance, you can review the site’s technical issues, such as internal broken links and old URLs, duplicate versions of the same page. In addition, you should leverage the internal links to show the most valuable site’s page and improve the navigation, and also acquire links from external websites.
Besides, you can prevent a link from passing its value (that’s also called “link juice”) to another link. In this case, some of the following methods can be applied:
- Add a “nofollow” attribute
- Use the meta robots tag (index, nofollow or noindex, nofollow)
- Point to a 302 redirect before landing on your site
- Point to a page using a meta refresh redirect before landing on your site
- Apply crawl restrictions, use disallow in the “robots.txt” file
- Make a JavaScript link invisible for crawlers
