Link equity is the ranking value a link passes from one page to another. When a trusted page links to yours, some of its standing flows across and helps your page compete in search; when the link is nofollowed, broken or badly redirected, less of that value arrives, or none.
How link equity works
The idea goes back to PageRank, Google’s original method of treating links as votes and weighting each vote by the importance of the page casting it. Google’s systems are far more complex now, but the principle survives: a page with many good links pointing to it has more value to pass on, and it shares that value among the links it contains.
Several things affect how much a single link carries:
- The linking page’s authority and relevance. A link from a respected publication about your subject counts for more than one from an unrelated page.
- Placement. A link within the main text of an article is generally treated as more meaningful than one in a footer repeated across thousands of pages.
- Attributes. Links marked rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored" or rel="ugc" tell Google not to treat them as endorsements. Since 2019 Google has described these as hints rather than strict instructions, so some may still be considered, but you should not count on it.
- Redirects and status codes. Google has said that server-side redirects such as a 301 do not lose PageRank in themselves. A link pointing to a page that returns a 404, though, passes nothing useful.
Equity also moves within your own site. The homepage usually attracts the most external links, and your internal linking decides how that value reaches service pages, product pages and articles further down.
Why it matters
For a UK small business with a modest number of external links, how that value is handled can decide whether key pages rank at all. The pattern I see most often: a website redesign changes every URL without redirects, cutting the site off from links it took years to earn. Close behind are a strong press link pointing at a page that was later deleted, and services that bring in revenue sitting four clicks deep with hardly any internal links.
None of these needs new links. Each needs the value you already have to be routed properly.
Common mistakes
- Deleting or renaming pages without a 301 redirect to the closest equivalent.
- Redirecting every old URL to the homepage, which Google may treat as a soft 404 and disregard.
- Trying to “sculpt” equity with nofollow on internal links. Since 2009 Google has not passed the withheld value to the page’s other links, so it is simply lost, and the nofollowed pages become harder for crawlers to discover.
- Judging a link’s worth only by a third-party score such as Domain Authority, which is a tool’s estimate, not something Google uses.
- Leaving important pages with few internal links while low-value pages are linked from every template.
How to act on it
Begin by finding where value leaks. Export your most-linked pages from Search Console’s Links report or a backlink tool and check that each one returns a 200 status or redirects in a single hop to a relevant live page. Any linked URL returning a 404 is a quick win: restore it or redirect it to its closest match.
Then look at how value flows internally. Make sure the pages with the most external links point, in context and with descriptive anchor text, to the pages that matter commercially. A short paragraph on a well-linked guide that mentions and links your main service can do more than one new external link.
When you earn new links, ask for them to point at the most relevant page rather than always the homepage. Checking how equity flows through a site is a standard part of my link building service, and it often overlaps with link reclamation, where lost links are recovered.