Guide
Link equity: what passes, and what silently does not
Link equity gets talked about as a fluid, which is where most of the confusion starts. It behaves more like a chain of permissions: a search engine has to be allowed to fetch the page, allowed to keep it, and asked to follow the link. Break any one of those and nothing passes at all. Not less, none.
The idea, briefly
A link from one page to another is a vote, and some of the linking page’s standing travels along it. That is the whole concept, and it is old: it was called link juice for years, PageRank was one implementation of it, and the loose modern word is equity.
Nobody outside Google can measure how much any single link passes. So an article quoting you a figure is inventing it, and the questions worth asking are binary ones: does this link pass anything, and if not, which condition failed.
The four conditions, in the order they break
These are the things our own checker reads on a page, and every one of them fails without any visible sign that something is wrong.
- 1. The link has to exist. Obvious, and the most common failure by a distance. A listing that was never published, a page rebuilt without your entry, a mention that names you in text and never links. Nobody writes to say so.
- 2. The crawler has to be allowed to fetch the page. A path disallowed in the site’s robots.txt is never read, so the link on it is never seen. The page loads perfectly for you. Read the robots.txt.
- 3. The page has to stay in the index. A noindex in a meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag header takes the page out, and a link on a page that is not in the index has nothing to pass from. Check for noindex.
- 4. The link has to be one engines are asked to follow. nofollow, ugc and sponsored all ask them not to. Read the rel.
Why the order matters
Most people check condition four and stop, because rel is the famous one. It is the last link in the chain: if two or three failed, the rel was never going to be read. A dofollow link on a page Google may not fetch is a dofollow link nobody will ever see.
The four conditions take about a minute to check together, and most people have never checked more than one of them on any link they own. Read one of your own pages, no account needed.
The fifth case: links that go through something
Plenty of links do not point at you directly. A directory routes its outbound click through a counter so it can measure clicks; a marketing page uses a link shortener; a site consolidates old URLs behind redirects. A normal permanent redirect is designed to carry equity through, and Google has said 30x redirects do not lose PageRank.
What breaks these is not the redirect but the traffic on it. A hop can answer with a header telling engines not to follow, which severs the chain while the anchor on the original page still looks like a clean dofollow link. That is the most convincing counterfeit in the whole subject, because every tool that reads only the anchor calls it a win.
Walking the chain hop by hop is the only way to see it, and it is worth doing on any link where the button does not point straight at your domain.
Division: why the page matters as much as the link
The classic model says a page shares what it can pass across its outbound links, so every additional link on a page takes a smaller share. Ranking today is more complicated than that arithmetic, but the direction still holds, and it has one very practical consequence.
A link from a page with three links on it is a different thing from a link on a page with two hundred. This is the real argument against link farms and against badge-covered homepages, including your own: every badge you add divides what your homepage passes among more recipients.
What we will not quantify
There is a genre of article assigning percentages to all this: how much a redirect loses, how much a nofollow passes, how much a sitewide link is discounted. Those numbers do not exist outside Google, and the ones you read were produced by somebody who needed a number for a slide.
What can be said without inventing anything is the binary part, which happens to be the part you can act on. A link either meets the four conditions or it does not. When it does not, you do not need to know how much you lost to know what to do about it.
A short audit you can run today
- Take your five most valuable backlinks. The ones you would name if somebody asked where your links come from.
- Open each page and run the four checks. Exists, crawlable, indexable, followable, in that order.
- Follow any that route through a counter. The chain is where the surprises live.
- Write down which failed and why. That list is worth more than the next ten links you were about to go and build.
Doing this once tends to change how people talk about their backlinks, because the gap between the count and the working set is usually wider than anyone expects. Which is the real reason target numbers mislead.
Questions people actually ask
What is link equity?
The value a link passes from one page to another: a vote that helps the target rank. It used to be called link juice, and both names describe the same idea, that some of a page’s standing flows along its outbound links. Nobody outside Google can measure how much any single link passes, which is why the useful questions are about whether a link passes anything at all, not how much.
How is link equity lost?
At any point in a chain that has to hold end to end. The page carrying the link has to be crawlable and indexable, the link itself has to be one search engines are asked to follow, and if it goes through a redirect, that hop has to survive too. A break at any one of those is total rather than partial: the link passes nothing, while still looking perfectly normal on the page.
Do nofollow links pass link equity?
They are asked not to, and Google has described the attribute as a hint rather than a directive, so the honest answer is that they are not designed to and may not. This is a much smaller deal than it is usually made out to be: a nofollow link still sends visitors, and visitors were the original point. It matters when you paid something permanent for the link and got the discounted version back.
Does a redirect lose link equity?
A normal permanent redirect is designed to carry it through, and Google has said 30x redirects do not lose PageRank. What actually breaks a chain is not the redirect itself but what rides along with it: a hop that answers with a robots directive telling engines not to follow, a chain long enough to be abandoned, or a final destination that errors. Those are readable, and they are the reason to look at the chain rather than assume it.
Does link equity get split between links?
The classic model says a page divides what it can pass across its outbound links, so the more links a page carries, the less each one conveys. Modern ranking is more complicated than that arithmetic, but the direction still holds and it is the practical reason a homepage stuffed with badges is a worse place to be linked from than a page with three links on it.
Is link equity the same as PageRank?
PageRank is Google’s original algorithm and one specific implementation of the idea; link equity is the loose industry word for the effect. Nobody sees the internal numbers any more, so treating them as the same thing is fine in conversation and misleading in analysis: whenever an article gives you a figure for equity passed, ask where it came from.
How do I know whether a link passes anything?
Read the page rather than the promise. Four things decide it and all four are visible: the link exists on the page, its rel does not discount it, the page can be fetched by a crawler, and the page can be kept in the index. Any of those failing makes the link decorative. All four are checkable in under a minute, and free checkers on this site read each one.
Four conditions, on every link, forever.
Checking once tells you where a link stood the moment you looked. Templates get rebuilt, rel attributes get tightened and listing pages pick up a noindex without notice. ShipDR reads all four conditions on every backlink you track, on a schedule, and tells you the day one of them stops holding.
- Every listing rechecked on a schedule, not once
- Live, dofollow and indexable, read from the page itself
- Told the day a backlink drops or flips
Adding a website and charting its Domain Rating is free, no card. The backlink engine is $10 once, per website, with no subscription.