How it spreads
The historical PageRank model divided a page’s contribution among outgoing links. This is a teaching model, not an exact description of Google today. You cannot infer that five links each receive 20% of actual value, or judge a menu by link count alone.
Internal links should help people and crawlers discover important pages. Compare CMS and sitemap URLs against the targets of discovered links; a crawler starting at the homepage cannot discover every orphan page by itself.
What loses it, and what does not
- Redirect a permanently moved page directly to a relevant successor; monitor status and target rather than estimating a percentage of lost PageRank.
- Noindex does not guarantee sustained crawling or signal transfer through links. Important pages should receive links from accessible, indexable pages.
- Fix links to 404 pages or remove them when no relevant successor exists. Do not redirect every error to the homepage.
- Canonical helps consolidate duplicates when the search engine accepts the declared URL.
Nofollow and the end of link sculpting
The rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc" attributes describe what kind of link this is. Since March 2020 Google treats them as hints rather than directives — it may take them into account for crawling and ranking, or not.
Do not use nofollow to calculate or control an exact allocation of internal link value. The equal-share consumption explanation comes from historical PageRank discussions; it is not a verifiable account of Google’s current algorithm. Qualify links according to their actual relationship.
<a href="https://example.com/offer" rel="sponsored">partner content</a>
<a href="https://forum.example/thread" rel="ugc">user post</a>What none of this measures
No tool reports the actual value Google assigns to a page. Metrics such as Domain Rating or Authority Score are proprietary models built on a vendor’s own link crawl. They are useful for comparing URLs inside one tool, and not for claims about what the search engine sees.
What is measurable, and useful, is what you can count on your own site: how many internal links point at a page, its click depth from the homepage, which URLs have no inbound link at all, and whether redirects or 404s sit in the path.
It is the value passed from a linking page to the page it points at, an idea that comes from the PageRank model. It is an industry term rather than an official Google one — the search engine publishes no number you could call a page’s equity.
Yes, they are two names for the same idea. "Link juice" is the older, informal term; "link equity" turns up more often in formal write-ups.
A permanent redirect supports consolidation of a moved URL, but does not guarantee unchanged rankings. Check destination relevance, the final response, internal links and whether Google has processed the change.
Do not use nofollow to calculate or control an exact allocation of internal link value. The equal-share consumption explanation comes from historical PageRank discussions; it is not a verifiable account of Google’s current algorithm. Qualify links according to their actual relationship.
The value itself cannot be read, but the structure can: count the internal links pointing at each page, the click depth from the homepage, and the URLs with no inbound link at all. Check whether redirects or 404s sit in those paths too.