Google's John Mueller on "Link Juice"

[engine]

In an interesting tweet, Google's John Meuller said,

I'd forget everything you read about "link juice." It's very likely all obsolete, wrong, and/or misleading. Instead, build a website that works well for your users.

[twitter.com...]

I wonder what brought this seemingly odd response. Is John being very literal, in that a great website will attract links?

[JesterMagic]

I was a little confused about his blanket statement until I read the question that prompted John's response:

I want to pass link juice of my home page to my category pages. Where should I place my category pages, in navigation menu or in the home page content?

So he is talking about spreading link juice from one page within your site to another.

[riccarbi]

Instead, build a website that works well for your users.

That's really hilarous!
"build a website that "works well" (what does this means? Please John, define it) for your users". It seems to me that Google doesn't give a damn about what works well for their users, these days. They just care about what works well for Alphabet's quarterly results and their shareholders' revenues. John, I have nothing against you, really, but follow my humble advice: quit from DoEvil as soon as you can, and find a good and mre ethic reason to wake up in your upcoming golden years' mornings...

[edited by: riccarbi at 9:51 pm (utc) on Jul 30, 2020]

[iamlost]

Ah yes, all that hypothetical overflowing home page link juice...

I keep waiting for the <self censored> kool-aid / link juice man to burst in posting about magical mystical third party metrics...

Silliness aside, traffic navigation and associated value flows (ha!) can be recursively factored to great effect, an understanding and capability beyond most/all at the link juice webdev level.

[samanthaphilippe]

Actually, I think his comments may be with the backdrop of Google's upcoming changes in 2021 where user experience will be key in ranking factors. Building a "good website" that "works well" in that context would mean providing what searchers want with good content, and a well-designed, navigable website. That's my two cents worth!

[JesterMagic]

As iamlost says traffic navigation and associated value flows are important and should be everyone's main concern. Having some sort of "link juice" that passes to sub pages of your site make sense. John by no means denies this, in fact his statement confirms it's existence since how can knowledge about something be obsolete or misleading if it doesn't exist?

Still, I find his statement similar to all others from Alphabet, "don't worry about SEO, build the site for the user". Which on the surface everyone should be doing.... I just wish Google would follow their own advice when it comes to their search engine and the overflow of ads and useless widgets.

[tangor]

Too much hokus pokus (sic) for me!

Nav "link juice", for me, means your nav is set up right.

As for what you might get from OTHER SITES, that's pretty much been decimated since the early 'Naughts'.

YMMV

[aristotle]

Years ago I used to draw vector diagrams to help me visualize the flow and distribution of "link juice" within my sites. I also included vectors to show where link juice came into the site and where it left the site.

Back then some people called the process of distributing link juice "page rank scupting". That was before google started treating nofollow links as "sinkholes" for link juice.

Now days I think that google views how often a link gets clicked as perhaps the most important measure of its value.

[zeus]

I have this feeling with there new update next year they will make AI a huge factor and that links dont matter that much as it is now.