What’s the best way to link from the homepage to an important internal page for the purpose of passing the most juice to that page?
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I love this test. I love on page SEO and the reason why I love this is in this whole enterprise, it is the one thing that you can control 100%. You are completely in control of everything that happens on your site. I really like figuring out the absolute best way to do things. I wanted to figure out what is the best way to pass internal link juice to the homepage.
The concept here is that you have nav links, sidebar links, links in the body or footer, is there an optimum link? The assumption would be in the body and I think everybody instinctively has that assumption but I have never seen anything that shows that it was a certainty. I have found a couple of sites that says it was.
Nobody really comes out with any confidence so I am really excited about this test. In addition, I personally learned a lot about Majestic and Moz and the things that they do and then I learned a really cool hack, I think, which I am going to show you.
What I did was, in the test site, we have three links – we’ve got the nav menu link, the body link, and the footer link. What I am trying to do is to measure what Majestic will pass, in terms of juice, to those pages. So the homepage has it’s Majestic metrics and I am going to look at what the internal pages get as a benchmark so that we could then see what is passed, in terms of what Majestic is thinking.
When you look at the different tools, Majestic does a fantastic job with internal linking so the assumption here is that maybe they are doing a lot better than other things. I set all that up and we are looking to see what it will pass. The pages, prior, did not have any metrics.
Because I wanted to juice things up a bit. I fired links from Dori’s network in the SIA just to get some action and activity to see what would pass through. It was a lot of work and nothing happened. Nothing at all. This happens quite regularly when you start testing and it is painful. Then you have to backtrack and figure out what was wrong.
I went into Majestic and checked the URL metrics and found a 404 not found. What I started realizing was when Majestic has this crawl error and I cannot figure out why it has this crawl error because it is not on the site itself, they won’t pass any internal juice. This is an important thing to think about if you are gauging any kind of internal juice metric, if there is an error in the homepage, at the URL level, it won’t pass any juice.
That is why you have pages that do not have any juice. Interestingly, in researching all these, Majestic counts internal links. So you might see an internal page and it shows 0 across the board but it has TF and CF, that is because it is counting internal links to that page.
The 0 just mean external links, but Majestic will count internal links, they will pass juice, and what will pass is the URL level metrics. Those are important points. You are looking at a site and you are evaluating if you want to get a link from them and you are using Majestic numbers to see what might be there. Look at it from the URL level.
Do not look at it from the root domain, for example. That is not going to tell you how much juice is going to pass. The URL level is going to show you. Then you might be looking at a page that does not have any metrics. They could be because the URL level at the domain or the homepage is showing a 404 or they do not have good internal linking. Those could be issues.
The interesting thing about Majestic that I have found in researching this whole issue is that Majestic will not show or credit internal links until there is an external link. If you look at a really high authority site, crazy high authority and it has got a domain authority of 70 and you look at the page where you are going to get your link from and it has a PA of 1.
The reason is that it does not have any external links coming into the site. If you want to be a Pros pro and you want to figure out what that page could actually give you and if it is worthwhile, fire in some links at a Forbes.com article and see the resulting PA. That would tell you what the resulting page authority would be. Because Moz needs to see external links before it will start counting the internal links.
This is also a good way to look at the internal structure of a competitor who is beating you – if they have these deep pages that seem to be ranking but has a PA of 1, you cannot use Moz to evaluate what they are doing, you could fire in some links and maybe get some PA and figure that out. Real pro tip there if that is what you want to do. If you need to use Moz, Majestic, or whatever to bounce things off to see the page level metrics, you can do that.
In this error, I was able to research and find all these out.
I needed a test site that would download successfully at the URL level. Fortunately, Carin Handsun came in with a test site. It downloaded successfully and it will pass its juice internally. On her site, we added the navigation link, the sidebar link, the body link, and the footer link. Then, we could have Majestic crawl the site and see what juice is passed internally.
Nav bar is passing 14-16, the side bar is passing 14-16, the body is passing 14-19, and the footer is also passing 14-19. The nav menu and side bar are passing the same and the body and footer are passing the same. We had a really great Friday Chat a couple of weeks ago about what these numbers mean.
Bottom line is, we know because there is only one link going on to this site and it is from the same location and we know that the 14-19 is the stronger links. That kind of puts the bet a lot on Majestic questions that we have had. This is the better link.
When looking at the body and the footer vs the menu and the sidebar, we can see that there is a 12.2% difference in the juice that is passed, looking at the citation flow. This is the first time that I have ever seen this. I have never really seen anybody that can quantify what the difference is between the menu link and what the nav menu might be. Granted, we are assuming Majestic knows what they are doing but this is the first insight, I think, that has been out there when it comes to the difference between the body and the sidebar or the body and the menu might be.
The next thing that was interesting was that, is the footer the same as the body and looking at that more, I think we were duped by WordPress. This link was placed in the bottom widget area which was on your dashboard and it was in this particular theme. But, the actual footer was the “Powered by WordPress” part.
The part where the link was, is not actually in the designated footer area but was actually still in the body, even though it had this little line and it looks like a footer, it is not in the actual designated footer. It is in the body so it is passing body juice. This is big and the reason why it is big is that what I think we could do is to create fake footers.
You could create what looks like a footer but designate the part that is actually a footer below that, where the copyright is, where the site name is, etc. That can be designated as the footer and tagged as such.
I think Google will tag is as the footer but you can design an element above that, that looks like a footer and there are links on it going to target pages – they will pass body juice, is what I think we are seeing. That is a very big edge that we could get.
How often does Moz update?
I think their update is terrible but they do have a submit to our crawler kind of thing and they allow you to submit two submissions a day. So if you want to get them to crawl – I think it takes them 24 hours to crawl after that. Let’s say you built a link to a particular page and you want to see the value of that link or in the situation where you want to see the PA of an internal page might be and you built some links to it, crawl the page where the link exists in their crawler then after 24 hours, it will update and you should be able to see some PA.
I do not think any body has shown what the link juice might be. I think this is the first insight into that. We all assumed that it is the body, I felt good that the body came up at the top. It was interesting that it is about 12% according to Majestic and obviously as I said, we are assuming that Majestic numbers are not messing up with us. That is the same thing that we have to assume with Moz, Ahref, SEMRush.
Obviously, take everything with a grain of salt but when it comes down to it, these are the tools that we have to use. Also, think about, when you are evaluating a page based on these metrics. How are they coming up with these metrics?
Now we know that when you’ve got a PA of 1, it doesn’t mean anything and it just means that there are no links pointing at them that Moz hasn’t found yet and it wouldn’t give any PA unless it sees external links. The other thing is, in terms of design, is the fake footer. If it’s not an actual footer area, it’s the body and it can potentially pass more juice.
I am not sure if you guys have already done a test on this but does this mean that links above and below the fold, as far as Majestic is concerned, is the same?
That is right but I have run tests showing that links above pass more juice simply because they are higher up in the page, I think there is no distinction on the fold but a link higher up will pass more juice.