Link Juice, Link Love, Link Condom…

It’s fun to be the local SEO guru sometimes. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of explaining some of SEO’s more risque jargon terms to my fellow IT coworkers. I couldn’t help but feel like I was teaching a class on sexual education, especially considering their reactions.

The explanation began when I mentioned the word “link juice,” which can be defined as positive ranking benefit within a search engine algorithm passed through a link. For example, if a link to Project Paradox appeared on someone else’s site, that link would be said to be passing link juice. A separate but related term, “link love,” can be defined as the act of passing link juice.

I went on to further explain the nature of the “link condom.” A link condom is a use of the rel attribute of the anchor HTML element that allows a webmaster to indicate that a link has no trust. A link with a link condom applied (e.g. <a href=”http://www.projectparadox.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Project Paradox gets no love</a>) does not grant any algorithmic ranking benefit to the destination site. In essence, a link condom prevents the transfer of link juice.

Link condoms are particularly useful for webmasters because they also prevent any negative impact of linking out to bad neighborhoods. Some websites are marked as spam by search engines for various reasons and linking to them can incur a ranking penalty for the linking website. By automatically applying a link condom in such high-risk areas as blog comments, forum posts, and wikis, webmasters can ensure that user-submitted links do not negatively impact their websites.

So, does any of this sound like the safe sex lectures we all heard in high school? It’s almost as if those bad neighborhoods everyone warns about linking to have some sort of search engine STD. Considering the logical progression of terms, I don’t think it would be far-fetched to say they’ve got “link herpes” or that, “If you link to someone, you’re linking to everyone they’ve ever linked to.”

Yes, I admit I’m being juvenile, but it’s hard not to be with this sort of industry jargon floating around. I wonder what sort of dirty SEO terminology I might’ve missed.