Alexander Dickson - Web Developer covering PHP, jQuery / Javascript, XHTML, CSS, more

Helping increase your link juice

These days, SEO is very important, and links on your page are an important part of improving your rankings. It is important to know a few things about the links on your page and how to improve them.

It is generally accepted a few major points concerning links on a page.

• Links placed higher up in the markup are worth more than those appear closer to the end.
• The text used as the anchor text is important (as is the title attribute).
• The more links you have on your web page, the less juice they will receive.
• You can tell search engines to not give link authority on a page by adding rel="external" to your anchors.

Location of links in markup

The closer to the top your link is in the markup, the better it will be ranked. If you'd like your links closer to the top, but don't want them to appear there in your layout, you can by using CSS to position them.

Anchor text

Look at the 2 examples below.

In case it wasn't obvious, the second example is much better for SEO. Your linking text is important. You can also help by adding a title attribute, but remember to not over do it! The more words you try and cram in there, the less important they will become! I have a feeling small words like the, and, a, etc won't be included because they don't provide any real meaning.

Quantity of links per page

To search engines, less is more. When selecting what to link to, make sure you link sparingly to good trusted (and if possible, related) sites.

Delegating link authority with rel="nofollow"

One important thing to know is that if you add rel="nofollow" to an anchor, you've effectively told search engines not to give it any authority. This is very important when accepting user input that may contain links. I have purposely not done this on my own comments, as I am giving the users a chance to show they can be trusted. See the example below of a nofollow'd link.

On large volume sites, adding the nofollow is very important to disuade spammers. They are far less likely to add links to your comment box or similar if they know the links will be automatically nofollow'd. Another imporant use is to not dilute your link juice. Instead of losing the juice because there are many links on your page, simply nofollow the links you care less about, and return the power to the links you love!