How does the number of obls on a page affect link juice?

[seanmccauley]

If you have acquired a link on a home or other page; just how can you value the contribution of that link. If a home page has a DA=50 and 100 obls (outbound links) should the DA be discounted significantly and is there an equation which can be applied to help quantify eg 50/100 *10 therefore link from this page is same value as link from DA=5 with only one link? Just how diluted does juice become if number of obls is high?

[HiveDigitalInc]

If we go by the original PageRank algorithm, then you can essentially divide the PageRank of the page (or MozRank or ACRank) by the number of links on the page (external or internal) and that is the amount of PR or mR passed by each link.

However, there are probably several modifiers now that have been added to tweak the flow of PR in terms of rankings...

1. Where does the link occur on the page in relation to other links (ie: is it the first or last on the page)
2. Is this the only link to your domain on the page or are their others?

You do not want to use DA or PA as a measurement of link quality as it is a machine generated score created by SEOMoz to indicate the rankability of a page or domain. Instead, you should be looking at MozRank and MozTrust of the page that your link is on.

Moreover, when using MozRank / MozTrust, you cant simply divide it by the number of links. You would need to first convert it to the Raw MozRank or Raw MozTrust (A logarithmic function), then divide it by the number of links, then re-convert it back into Pretty mozRank or MozTrust.

This is because the mR and mT (just like PageRank) are logarithmic scales from 0 to 10. Each integer increase actually represents about an 8x improvement. Having 1 links from a PR8 page that has 7 other links (8 total) is not like PR8 divided by 8 = a PR1, it is actually about a PR7 level link!!!

[jwest5150]

So Russ, do you have a formula for making those conversions?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

I endorsed Russ's answer because of his technical nuances.

Let me put it another way. To put it simply, the value of the link is can be diminished by the number of links on the source page. Unfortunately, there's no easy formula to calculate this. The truth is, different links have different editorial value based upon where they appear on the page.

Matt Cutts has famously said to put your most important links towards the top of your content, meaning within the body of text and not in sidebars or footers.

Other factors that play into determining the value of a link include the topic of the URL/Root Domain that the link is found on, mozTrust of the site, context of the link, and probably 100's of other factors. We don't know the exact formula, but if we look at the links like humans and ask ourselves "how valuable is this link?" we can usually get a pretty good estimation.