Link equity describes the idea that a link carries some ranking value from the linking page to the page it points at. The concept comes from PageRank, where a page's score is shared among the pages it links to. SEOs use the term to reason about redirects, internal links, and nofollow, but nobody outside Google can measure it directly.
Where the idea comes from
The original PageRank paper described a page's importance as flowing through its outbound links to other pages. A page with many strong inbound links has more to pass on, and that value is divided among its outbound links. Link equity is the practical shorthand for that flow.
Google's systems have changed a great deal since then, and Google does not explain how much any individual link is worth today. Treat link equity as a way of thinking about links, not as a number to optimize.
What seems to affect it
Most of what practitioners believe about link equity is inferred from Google's public guidance and patents. These are reasonable working assumptions, not confirmed rules.
- The strength and relevance of the linking page
- Whether the link is qualified with nofollow, sponsored, or ugc, which Google treats as hints
- Where the link sits on the page, with body links usually assumed to count for more than boilerplate
- How many other links the page contains
- Whether redirects sit between the link and its destination
Redirects and link equity
Google has said that 301 and 302 redirects do not cause a loss of PageRank. When you move or merge pages, a server-side redirect from the old URL to the closest new equivalent lets existing backlinks keep pointing somewhere useful. Long redirect chains are still worth fixing because they slow crawling and each hop is another chance for something to break.
Internal links distribute it
Links from your own pages matter too. A blog post that has earned many backlinks can link to the product or comparison pages you most want to rank. This is one of the few levers you fully control, and it is often underused on SaaS sites where the blog and the product pages are maintained by different teams.
Example
Routing value from a popular guide
An illustrative HR software company, Rosterly, has a guide to writing shift schedules that many HR blogs link to. Its pricing and comparison pages have almost no backlinks. The team adds contextual links from the guide to its shift scheduling feature page and to a comparison page, so readers and crawlers can follow a path from the popular guide to the commercial pages.
Common mistakes
Hoarding links with nofollow on internal links
Adding nofollow to your own internal links to “sculpt” link equity has not worked as intended for many years and mostly makes your pages harder to crawl.
Deleting pages with backlinks
Removing a page that others link to without redirecting it wastes those links. Redirect it to the most relevant live page instead.
Questions
Yes. They are informal names for the same idea.
Not directly. Third-party tools estimate it with their own scores, but those are models, not Google data.
Since 2019 Google treats nofollow as a hint, so it may choose to use a nofollow link in some way. In practice you should assume they pass little and value them mainly for traffic and visibility.
