I ran across an interesting conversation on Twitter, started by Ashley and her tweet: “Sign my petition to get all SEOs to stop using the term “link juice”.”
Do you think that the term “link juice” is gross? Does it relay un-professionalism in the SEO community? Well, let’s first take a look at a definition of “link juice” and what it means, according to Woorank:
“Link juice is a colloquial term in the SEO world that refers to the power or equity passed to a site via links from external or internal sources. This power is interpreted as a vote of recommendation toward your site and is one of the most important factors in determining your site’s search ranking (and PageRank).”
If you search Google for “link juice”, you will see that Google themselves pull out that definition and show it at the top of the search results. What I find interesting to note, though, according to Pedro Dias, and ex-Googler, the phrase “link juice” doesn’t appear anywhere in any official Google documentation. Google doesn’t use it.
I don’t really have a personal opinion as to whether or not the phrase should go away or not. However, there are some rare cases where I have struggled to find a better keyword phrase. Could it be something like “link equity”. I’m not sure.
In any case, since I couldn’t find a real petition to ban the term “link juice”, I decided to start a petition myself. If you believe that use of the term “link juice” should be stopped by all SEOs, then feel free to sign the petition:
https://www.change.org/p/seos-google-bing-stop-all-seos-from-using-the-phrase-link-juice
Whether or not this actually gets SEOs to stop using the term is remain to be seen. But at least it’s all in fun, right?!?