How Authority Signals Travel Through Backlinks?

Link building is an essential practice to build relevance and visibility on search engines. It’s a type of digital endorsement that passes down authority from one page to another.

SEOs call this term the authority “link equity,” or “link juice.” But how this authority gets passed down to different websites is unclear to many. If you are to succeed in search engine marketing or get higher visibility on the Google search engine, it’s something you must understand first. 

Here’s a simple guide explaining link equity, how it travels through backlinks, and the factors that affect it. 

What Are Authority Signals?

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Authority signals to a website indicate “votes of confidence” about a website’s credibility, trustworthiness, and expertise in its domain. Starting with Google's original PageRank algorithm, authority signals now expanded into more advanced frameworks like E-E-A-T. 

The definition aside, in a practical scenario, authority signals are built with high-quality backlinks, brand mentions, depth of content, and user engagement. 

In simpler words, when other brands and websites use your content, page, or links on their website with a backlink pointed to your website, they are sending out link equity, and it affects your website at both the page and domain levels.

The Mechanism behind Authority Signal Transfer

The mechanism of authority signals translates into “recognition” in simple English. Here’s how this recognition works:

Link Equity (Link Juice): First, you must create high-quality content to be published on a high authority website. In exchange, they provide a backlink linking your website to theirs. Simply put, when a high-authority website links to your website, it passes down a portion of its link equity or link authority (PageRank) to your website. 

"Dofollow" vs. "Nofollow": Now, when it comes to backlinks, your website can get a Dofollow or a nofollow link. Dofollow ones are the standards and ideal for passing maximum link equity to your website. However, nofollow links are also relevant. They act as hints for ranking and work well in AI-driven search environments. 

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Editorial Value: Let’s say that you have a high authority page with valuable information on link building. Another website using that as a reference in their content will pass down link equity to your website. But this process must be natural, and your content must provide genuine and relevant value to the domain you’re linking back to. 

Key Factors Affecting Authority Signal Strength

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Link building is critical to ranking high and staying relevant. But it’s not always two plus two leading to four; meaning, you have to go beyond the mechanical placement of links to gain backlink authority. 

Here’s how this works:

Relevance: Content relevance is a key factor affecting whether your link-building works or not. Links built within the same industry, or niche, hold more weight compared to a link simply placed on a website. 

Link Authority: A backlink from a high authority website provides better link authority compared to one from a spammy or lower-quality website. 

Placement and Context: Contextual backlinking is one of the driving factors of strong link equity getting passed down to your website. Here, the right context means placing the link into the content body of a page instead of placing it in the header, footer, sidebars, or in the comments.  

The domain authority of a website’s link back also has an effect on the link equity passed down to it. The quality of other links, as well as the choice of anchor texts, also affects link authority.

Types of Backlink Signals

The right link-building practices translate into the following backlink benefits:

• Direct Authority: High-DA links passing broad trust.

• Topical Authority: Niche-relevant links build expertise graphs.​

• Contextual Signals: Anchor text, surrounding content, and co-occurrences.

How Authority Travels Through Your Site

Initial Link Target: You build backlinks to your website, which makes link equity impact your website in multiple ways. For starters, the page you're building a backlink for (blog post, home page, or landing page) gets instant visibility improvements.

Internal Linking:  the page receiving link authority from other pages transfers the link authority to the ot her low authority pages on that website through internal linking structure.

Faster Indexing:  Search engine crawlers follow the backlinks. The link authority passed to your website helps your web pages to be found by the crawlers easily. As a result, the website starts to index faster. 

Measuring Signal Flow

Link equity isn’t measured in a single unit. However, you can understand and make sense of the flow through detailed website analysis. Here are a few things you can do:

1. Analyse the website’s internal and external links using SEO tools.

2. Understand the relevance of the website links and follow the status of the link, passing the value to your page. 

3. Track value scores like DA/PA on MOZ, or track the Majestic Trust Flow tool to track how authority passes on to your website. 

What Affects the Flow?

The following are the key factors affecting link equity: 

Time Your Link Building Process

While the link-building process passes on value score to your website, it must be done gradually. It must follow a natural and steady process of accumulating links instead of having a bulk of links built to your website. 

Getting a large volume of backlinks can be seen as spam, and doing so can get a platform a face penalty risk. Link built in large volume within a small time window is a spammy practice. Not timing the process and the volume leads to the links getting affected. 

Diversity in Links Matters

The crawler does prioritise relevance. But it also values variety in the type of links getting built for a domain. Instead of getting multiple links from the sources, get high-quality links from multiple and diverse sources to be prioritised by Google. 

Technical Health

Equity flow from another website gets interrupted if the links are poor or broken. Ensure to maintain the technical health of the website, check for broken backlinks, and ensure proper internal link placement for better flow of link authority throughout the website. 

Build Algorithm-Compliant Link Building Process

Link building is an essential SEO process that translates into multiple benefits for brands and marketers. You can extract the right SEO benefits by clearly understanding how link juice flows from one domain to another. 

Your knowledge of how link authority flows helps you build an algorithm-compliant link-building process. It increases your chances of withstanding algorithmic changes and staying top of mind with users.