Link equity

Link equity is the value a link passes from one page to another. Search engines treat links as endorsements: a page that receives many links, from other sites or from elsewhere on your own site, accumulates authority it can pass along through its own outgoing links. The informal name is "link juice"; the mechanism descends from PageRank, Google's original ranking idea.

Why it matters

Equity is one reason two equally good pages can rank very differently. It also explains Google's blunt internal-linking rule: "Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site". A page with no inbound links, an orphan page, receives no equity at all, no matter how strong the rest of your site is.

What you control

You cannot dictate who links to you, but internal links are entirely yours. Your homepage and your most-linked articles hold the most equity, so where they link is a real decision: pointing them at the pages you want to rank is the "rebalance" step of an internal link audit. Equity also survives URL changes only if you forward it: a 301 redirect tells Google to consolidate the old page's signals onto the new address, while a deleted page with no redirect simply drops them.

Link equity in BeeRanked

BeeRanked protects equity automatically: when a page's URL changes, every internal link pointing at it is rewritten and a redirect is created, so no link on your site ever leaks value at a dead address. The Internal Links graph shows where your equity flows, making the pages that need more inbound links easy to spot.