Glossary Terms

Link Dilution

Link dilution is the way a single web page's link equity, sometimes called PageRank, gets divided among all the links that page contains, so that every link you add gives each individual link a smaller share of that page's authority. Think of a page's authority as a tip jar at the end of a shift. Whatever is in the jar gets split between everyone working that night. Two people on shift, each takes half. Ten people on shift, each takes a tenth. Nobody added or removed money from the jar. The same total just got cut into more pieces. A web page's outgoing links share its authority the same way. The page holds a certain amount. It passes a portion of that along to the pages it links to. The more links on the page, the thinner each share becomes. When a page links to another page, it passes along a fraction of its own authority. The original PageRank idea, the model Google was built on, split that authority roughly evenly across a page's links. A page linking to four places gave each link about a quarter. A page linking to forty gave each about a fortieth. Modern search ranking is far more involved than that early model, and Google weighs many signals now. But the core instinct holds: a link from a focused page carries more weight than a link from a page crowded with a hundred other links. This is why a mention in the body of a tightly written article tends to count for more than the same link buried in a sprawling footer. Two everyday WordPress habits dilute links without anyone meaning to. The first is the bloated navigation. A mega-menu listing every page on the site, plus a footer that repeats half of them, means every page links to dozens of others on every single load. The second is the link-heavy post. A blog post that links out twenty times spreads its authority across all twenty destinations. The fix is restraint. Link to what genuinely helps the reader, link to the page you are betting on more than once if it earns it, and let the rest go. Fewer, better-chosen links beat a wall of them.