One of the most important SEO hacks involves controlling the way that “link juice” flows in your website. Link juice is the term SEO people use to refer to how Domain Authority moves through a link from one page to another. One of the most important concepts about Domain Authority (DA) is that each page on the internet is measured for DA as a separate entity. Each page has a DA that is constructed from the pink profile leading to that page. Those links can come from the home page or other pages on a website, or they can come from outside the website. If the links from the home page to an internal page then, of course, the DA of the home is the upper limit of the link juice that can pass to any internal page.
Websites cannot, therefore “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.” In order to be significant in ranking a website must have inbound links from other more authoritative sites. Not just any inbound link will be powerful. The link itself needs to come from a page with high DA and not some low-level 4th or lower tier page.
Let’s make a simple metaphor for the way link juice works. Let’s say that you have power cards and ten friends to give them too. Each friend will get ten cards each, and this gives them a power score of 10. However, if you want to provide the power cards to 100 friends, then each friend will get one power card each. This is a simplistic example of how DA moves within and between websites. The actual mathematical equation to describe these relationships is way more complicated, but this analogy will suffice to help you make every linking decision inside and out of your website.
So your home page has 100 power cards to distribute to pages on your website and other websites. The more links that leave your home page, the more DILUTE each link becomes. There are two crucial things to notes about the way DA moves through these links. First, all links are equal and you cannot throttle up or down how much DA moves them. Secondly, you can use a “nofollow” relationship code, and Google will not allow link juice to pass through the link. So you can turn the link OFF regarding passing DA.
There are few typical website structural issues that come from these rules that you can HACK to make significant ranking changes. Since the majority of all websites have top navigation menus that appear on every page on their website, this bleeds link juice everywhere in the website evenly. The DA becomes very dilute making 2nd and third tier pages very weak and unattractive to Google indexing. Once you have decided what to target regarding keywords and pages have been optimized for those keywords, you can plan out your linking strategy. First put nofollow codes on all the navigation bar links and pages that are unimportant for search, like terms and policy pages. Remember, the link still works, it just doesn’t link the link juice going to the important pages. Once you have “nofollowed” the navigation menu links, make sure you have embedded text links to each important internal page within the content lower on the home page. Select the anchor text of the link to target specific keyword searches.
You can do a few experiments with this approach by tracking ranking changes that occur within a week to 10 days following this action. Don’t worry this is all reversible if you don’t get the results you want. My guess is you will be amazed to see actual ranking changes happen on the precise keywords you selected for improvement.