Can I Buy You A Drink? Google Juice, Pointing, and Farms

I recently received a comment that asked:

I had heard that one way links to your site are better. That mutual linking decreases the Googlishiness of your site. I would like to hear more on your thinking about this.

There are 3 factors involved here. First, there’s a concept of “Google Juice”. This is probably the largest impact on your SEO.

The idea is that each page has some amount of value, called page rank. The rank is actually a value from zero to ten, with the highest being a higher rank. Let’s say that the page rank is the amount of Google Juice that page has.

Be very clear that this is not exact, but I’m describing concepts and relationships, not mathematical algorithms. It’s the relationships and proportions that we’re dealing with.

Each link from that page to an external page, a page on someone else’s site, sends off a little Google Juice with it. It’s like a vote of confidence for that other page. The amount of juice it sends (WARNING! Math ahead!) is equal to the total amount of juice divided by the number of links.

Imagine a bucket (your page) and it has a bunch of tubes coming out of the bottom of it (your links). They fill up other buckets (other sites). The more tubes you have, the less juice each one gets. The more tubes from other buckets filling up your bucket, the more juice you have.

If you imagine a bucket that is filling another bucket, but that other bucket is then filling your bucket, your head might explode, so don’t think about that image.

If you have a page rank worth 5 and you have 5 external links, each links is worth 1. If you also have a menu with 5 internal links, then each link is worth a half. Those 5 internal links are to yourself, so you’re passing yourself 2.5 and you’re passing the external sites 2.5, each link getting a half and there’s 5 of them, so 5 times a half is 2.5. Still with me?

Let’s take a quick TV break. I interviewed Coach from Survivor today. He’s a great interview. He likes Jerri, thinks she’s a great girl, but he can’t talk to her by contract, until the actual finale of the show when the winner is revealed. He’s planning on talking to her then and when asked about a relationship, said “we’ll see”.

And we’re back, our minds cleared from all that math.

Considering only Google juice, yes, it’s best to have all the links in the world pointing at your site and no links from your site to anywhere else.

There’s another factor they consider along with Google juice. They consider the pages that you link to. You actually get credit for linking to high page rank, related pages. If you set up a brand new site, with no page rank, and linked to a bunch of sites that all related to your keyword, they figure that your site must be about that keyword. This won’t get you as much credit as Google juice, but it counts.

Considering that factor, it is good to link to related sites. With this factor, I’d say that it’s good to link back and forth between (related keyword) sites.

The last factor to consider is that they are looking for artificial “link farms”. If you just set up sites for the purpose of driving traffic, creating links, trying to push the limits of decency, they’ll ban you and you’ll drop out of the index faster than something that goes really fast.

With all three of these factors considered, it looks like it’s OK to link back and forth between sites, but not too much. As always, if you are natural about it, it works fine. If you go over the top, it’s not good.