Increase the link juice from your backlinks

OK so this may seem obvious to some of you but I have noticed that some people don’t seem to be making the most of their backlinks.

For those of you who are already unsure of what I’m talking about, a backlink is a link from another website to your site – in essence the Search Engines see it as a recommendation. Now what makes these recommendations more powerful is a whole new topic but one major factor in this is the page rank or popularity of the referring/linking site. Basically the higher they rank, and the more trusted they are, the more link juice you get from the link.

So how do you make the backlinks you already have more powerful – quite simple – increase the referrer’s popularity!

OK so most of you now are thinking “why should I spend my time boosting someone else’s ranking when I should be concentrating on my own site”? Which is a fair question. In answer – if you boost the popularity of your referrers then effectively you are also boosting your own rankings – you are helping them to help you. Link juice is a complicated business and no-one really know exactly what makes the best links but one thing we are all sure on is that the better quality and the higher the rank of the referrer the more juice is passedSo am I saying that fewer more popular links are better than more less popular ones? er… dunno – let’s work it out:

I’m afraid the only figure I could get my hands on were comparisons between normal sites and Google trusted sites (like .edu or .gov etc) but I think it’s fair to assume that this principle can be carried over to page rank and popularity.

So: a normal site (.com etc) which has a page rank of 5 links to your site – you get the following bleed through of link juice:

* Site 1 – Pagerank of 5 but has 50 links on the page bleeds: 0.0012 PR
* Site 2 – Pagerank of 5 but has 10 links on the page bleeds: 0.430 PR
* Site 3 – Pagerank of 5 but has only 2 links on the page bleeds: 0.776 PR

and the same but from a trusted source (.gov, .edu or old domain)

* Site 1 – Pagerank of 5 but has 50 links on the page bleeds: 0.4352 PR
* Site 2 – Pagerank of 5 but has 10 links on the page bleeds: 0.88721 PR
* Site 3 – Pagerank of 5 but has only 2 links on the page bleeds: 1.176 PR

Now that is quite a difference – obviously it may not be so much for non-trusted sites but I think the principle still applies.

Apart from the possible extra link juice you can also use this to your advantage in another way – e.g. if you manage to get 10 extra links to your referrer you may be able to contact them and ask them to put your link in a more prominant location – you at least have some bargaining power – plus the fact that they already like you enough to naturally link to you! Gotta be worth a try!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this – especially if anyone has any stats or research to prove or nullify this theory. Comments below are welcome.