What is PageRank? How Google Measures Authority

Third-party tools have created proxy metrics: Domain Authority (DA) by Moz, Domain Rating (DR) by Ahrefs, and Authority Score by Semrush. These are not Google's metrics and are not perfectly correlated with actual rankings, but they correlate reasonably well with overall domain authority and are useful for comparative analysis.

Internal links distribute PageRank throughout your site. A link from your homepage to a blog post passes some of the homepage's PageRank authority to that post. This is why linking to important pages from the homepage and main navigation is a foundational SEO tactic — it signals importance to Google.

Link equity (formerly called "link juice") is the SEO value passed from one page to another through hyperlinks. Maximize link equity: (1) Earn high-authority backlinks — links from DR 50+ domains pass significantly more equity than low-authority sites, (2) Optimize internal linking — link from your highest-authority pages to pages you want to rank, (3) Fix broken internal links — broken links leak equity with no destination, (4) Flatten your site structure — keep important pages within 3 clicks of homepage (shorter link path = more equity), (5) Avoid excessive outbound links on important pages (each outbound link dilutes equity leaving the page), (6) Use descriptive anchor text for internal links (helps Google understand page context).

Toxic backlinks come from: spam sites, link farms, private blog networks (PBNs), irrelevant foreign-language sites, and low-quality directories. Modern Google is generally good at ignoring low-quality links rather than penalizing for them. When to disavow: only if you have received a manual penalty notification in Google Search Console, or if you can clearly see a correlation between a large toxic link acquisition and a traffic drop. For naturally accumulated toxic links without a penalty, disavowing is usually unnecessary and can be counterproductive. Use the Disavow Tool conservatively — incorrectly disavowing good links can hurt rankings.

Legitimate high-quality link building strategies: (1) Digital PR — create original research, data studies, or newsworthy content that journalists cite, (2) Guest posting on respected industry publications with genuine editorial standards, (3) HARO (Help a Reporter Out) — provide expert quotes to journalists seeking sources, (4) Broken link building — find broken links on relevant sites and offer your content as replacement, (5) Resource page link building — get listed on industry resource pages, (6) Creating linkable assets — tools, calculators, comprehensive guides that others naturally reference. Avoid any link building that involves payment for links (violates Google's guidelines and can result in penalties).