SEO - is domain authority passed through links?

11 replies
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Hey folks,

I have been wondering about this scenario lately.

Say you have a high authority domain, like a cnn.com, which has lots of pages.

There are thousands of pages on cnn.com, many new ones are created every day.

A link from the cnn.com homepage would undoubtedly pass a lot of 'juice' to another site, but what about a link from one of the site's subpages? If that subpage has no inbound links from other domains, no toolbar PageRank of its own, etc., what is the value of that link?

We know that the subpage will likely rank high in search results; this is why pages from Wikipedia for example show up so often in long tail results.

But does the "juice" passed along from that subpage's links take into account the fact that it is hosted on an authority domain?

Does anyone know of any articles that discuss this?
#authority #domain #links #passed #seo
  • Profile picture of the author innocent07
    Banned
    'pass alot of juice?'

    Are you on about orange juice or apple juice? hehe.

    But seriously good question, lets see what the forum says.
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  • Profile picture of the author apatters
    Anyone have any information on this?

    Thanks!
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  • Profile picture of the author askloz
    more links that point to that particular page, the more authoritative in nature your link will be seen in the search engines
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  • Profile picture of the author apatters
    Yes indeed, a page that has many inbound links is seen as more authoritative

    The question here is, if a page has no inbound links, but is hosted on a very authoritative domain, will its outbound links carry more weight than they would if the page was hosted on a domain that has very little authority?
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  • Profile picture of the author askloz
    It would benefit the domains' page more than yours since it has more 3rd party references.
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  • Profile picture of the author WL_Marketing
    Originally Posted by apatters View Post

    Hey folks,

    I have been wondering about this scenario lately.

    Say you have a high authority domain, like a cnn.com, which has lots of pages.

    There are thousands of pages on cnn.com, many new ones are created every day.

    A link from the cnn.com homepage would undoubtedly pass a lot of 'juice' to another site, but what about a link from one of the site's subpages? If that subpage has no inbound links from other domains, no toolbar PageRank of its own, etc., what is the value of that link?

    We know that the subpage will likely rank high in search results; this is why pages from Wikipedia for example show up so often in long tail results.

    But does the "juice" passed along from that subpage's links take into account the fact that it is hosted on an authority domain?

    Does anyone know of any articles that discuss this?
    It generally depends on how much internal links on cnn (and other external links link to that page). The more, the more pagerank. As far as the google algorithm seems to go, each page is a seprate entity.
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  • Profile picture of the author dburk
    Hi apatters,

    The first rule in SEO is that search engines rank pages not websites (or domains). With this rule in mind, it does not matter how much authority the home page of a website has, it only matters how much authority the page containing the link has. The "link juice" is then divided by the number of links on that page.

    Remember to always think pages, not sites.
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  • Profile picture of the author askloz
    That's true, but authority of a site helps. Take Ezine Articles for instance, many articles don't have a high authority on them, but the parent (domain) has some precedence over the child (page), unless that page turns into an adult.
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  • Profile picture of the author johnsamuels
    Does the page have internal links? I can't imagine a page on cnn being orphaned so yes, a link from an internal page with no inbound external links would do ok.
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