It is an informal name for link equity, the ranking value one page passes to another through a link. Google does not use the phrase. The underlying idea is PageRank.

Do nofollow links pass link equity?

The attribute asks Google not to pass it. Since 2019 Google treats nofollow, sponsored and ugc as hints, so it may choose to count such a link. There is no public data on how often it does.

Does a 301 redirect pass link equity?

Yes, according to Google. Gary Illyes is reported to have said in 2016 that 30x redirects no longer lose PageRank. A redirect to an unrelated page can be treated as a soft 404 and pass nothing.

Do internal links pass link equity?

Yes. Internal links carry value and anchor text between your own pages. That is how links earned by a guide or the homepage reach product and service pages.

Can I see how much link equity a page has?

No. Google publishes no score. Tool metrics such as Ahrefs' URL Rating estimate page-level link strength from the vendor's own crawl.

Link equity and link juice: what passes through a link

Link equity is the ranking value that passes from one page to another through a link. “Link juice” is the older, informal name for the same thing. Neither is a Google term. Both describe how PageRank moves: a page that has earned value from its own links shares part of it with the pages it links to.

The idea is useful as long as you remember it is a model. Nobody outside Google can measure how much value a given link passes. What is known comes from the original PageRank paper, Google’s public statements, a court exhibit and the 2024 leak.

Where the idea comes from

In the 1998 paper that introduced Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page defined the PageRank score so that each page divides its score among its outgoing links. A page with five links gives each one a larger share than a page with fifty. They also included a damping factor, usually set to 0.85, so some value is lost at each step.

SEOs turned that into a picture of liquid flowing through pipes, which is where “juice” comes from. The picture gets three things right:

value arrives through links
a page can only pass on what it has
the more links a page has, the smaller each share

Google’s Gary Illyes said in April 2024 that Google needs “very few links” to rank pages, so equity is one input among several.

What the picture gets wrong

Modern PageRank is not a simple flow. A Google engineer interview, published as a court exhibit in the US antitrust case and reported in May 2025, describes PageRank as “a single signal relating to distance from a known good source”, used as an input to a quality score. That is closer to “how near is this page to trusted sites” than to “how much liquid reached it”.

Links on one page are also not equal. A Google patent known as the reasonable surfer model is reported to describe links passing different amounts depending on position, prominence and how likely a reader is to click. A link in the main text is treated as stronger than one in a footer. How search engines evaluate links covers this.

And equity is not relevance. The words of the link, the anchor text, feed a separate relevance signal.

What passes equity and what does not

Situation	Does value pass?	Source and confidence
Normal followed link in the main text	Yes	The basic PageRank model
Link with `nofollow`, `sponsored` or `ugc`	Possibly. Google treats these as hints since 2019	No public data on how often such links count
301 or 308 redirect to an equivalent page	Yes	Gary Illyes is reported to have said in July 2016 that 30x redirects no longer lose PageRank
Redirect to an unrelated page, such as everything to the homepage	Often not. It can be treated as a soft 404	Reported statements by Google’s John Mueller
`rel="canonical"` pointing to another URL	Link signals are consolidated on the canonical URL	Google’s documentation is reported to call it a strong hint, not a command
Link on a page set to noindex for a long time	Probably not	Reported Mueller statement. Google’s comments have varied
Link that is not a real `<a href>` element, such as a JavaScript click handler	May not be followed	Reported from Google’s documentation on crawlable links
Link on a page Google has not indexed	Unlikely to count	Logical requirement

Google is also reported to have advised keeping redirects in place for at least a year so that signals transfer fully. Link attributes explains the three labels in detail.

Nofollow does not save equity

Site owners once added nofollow to some links on a page to push more value through the others. This was called PageRank sculpting. In June 2009, Google’s Matt Cutts explained that it no longer worked. His example was a page with ten links, five of them nofollowed. The five normal links each pass one tenth of the page’s PageRank, not one fifth. The share that belonged to the nofollowed links is not handed to the rest.

The practical point is that you cannot hoard equity by labelling outgoing links. Linking out to useful sources costs you nothing you could have kept.

How equity moves inside your site

External links bring value in. Internal links decide where it goes. The 2024 leak shows Google storing internal and external anchors separately, according to analyses by iPullRank and Hobo. It also contains a field described as the PageRank of the site’s homepage, attached to every document. Analysts read that as a default level of authority for new pages. The field is documented. How it is used is an inference.

Most natural links point at homepages and at informational pages such as research, tools and guides. Product, category and service pages attract few. Ahrefs’ study of one million keywords, published in January 2025, found that links correlate less with rankings for commercial and transactional queries than for informational ones.

That leads to a standard working method:

Earn links to pages that people want to cite. Linkable assets covers which formats work.
Link from those pages to your commercial pages inside the main text, with descriptive anchors.
Keep important pages within about three clicks of the homepage. This is a rule of thumb, not a Google rule.
Find pages with no internal links pointing to them and add some.

Which pages need links shows how to choose targets.

How equity gets wasted

Broken pages with backlinks. A page that earned links and now returns a 404 passes nothing on. Redirect it to the closest equivalent page.
Redirect chains. Each extra hop is another place for the transfer to fail.
Irrelevant redirects. Sending every old URL to the homepage risks the links being dropped.
Lost links. An Ahrefs study dated February 2024 found that about two thirds of links to sites over the previous nine years were dead.

Fixing these is usually the cheapest link work available, because the other site already decided to link. Link reclamation sets out the process.

Estimating equity with tools

No tool shows Google’s numbers. Ahrefs’ URL Rating is a page-level, PageRank-like estimate that counts internal and external links. Domain-level scores describe the whole site and say little about the single page that will link to you. Each vendor builds its metric on its own crawl, so the numbers differ between tools. Our comparison of backlink analysis tools lists the options.

When you judge a possible link, open the page. Check that it is indexed, that the link sits in the main text, and that the page is not a list of hundreds of outgoing links.

Where to go next

Terms such as soft 404 and canonical tag are in the glossary.