Do links give value if they are not clicked?

I've been doing a campaign for getting contextual backlinks mainly form guest posts.

My question is, If no one clicks the link inside the article, does that give any juice? Is value determined by traffic in this case?

Thank you.

Based on my understanding. They don't have to click.

Some on the forums believe that even if they are nof0ll0w they help. Not sure how true.

Yes. There is no (legal) way for the search engines to find/know about who visited your website from the link placed on the X site.

Veil123 said:

Yes. There is no (legal) way for the search engines to find/know about who visited your website from the link placed on the X site.

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But Google Analytics does that so there is a way for them to know.

Yes, the value passed on is referred to as link juice. The link will pass on authority to your site.

Stefan Yambolov said:

But Google Analytics does that so there is a way for them to know.

Click to expand...

And what about the sites that don't have Analytics installed? Does Google ignore them?

You don't need clicks on a link in order for it to pass PageRank (link juice). Value is determined by other factors.

Stefan Yambolov said:

But Google Analytics does that so there is a way for them to know.

Click to expand...

The google analytics report is not supposed to have ANY impact on the website traffic/juice at all.

Matt Cutts

“The answer is no. Webspam does not use Google Analytics, and a while ago I went and checked and search quality in general does not use Google Analytics in ranking. So, you can use Google Analytics, you can not use Google Analytics, it won’t affect your ranking within Google search results. Now, just to cover, in case you’re very very curious, one tiny corner case, which is; what if my site was very very slow, and adding Google Analytics just barely tipped me over the edge, to where my page or my site looked like it loaded very slowly. And the answer to that is also good. Google Analytics has recently introduced new asynchronous JavaScript code that you can introduce, you can add on to your page, and it will wait and load up that JavaScript after the toolbar unload event. So even if you’re worried about, well what if Google Analytics might slow my page down a little bit, they’re actually on the cutting edge of having good javascript that won’t affect the load time for users and thus and could in no way affect your search engine results either.”

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That is why I said there isn't a LEGAL way of doing it.

Leith said:

And what about the sites that don't have Analytics installed? Does Google ignore them?

You don't need clicks on a link in order for it to pass PageRank (link juice). Value is determined by other factors.

Click to expand...

This could be IM's very own: "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

To answer the above question, no it doesn't matter.

Any correlation between a link that is regularly clicked passing more "juice" is most likely a byproduct of an already strong page. Websites with real traffic will naturally generate referral traffic for their links, however, these links (when placed on the same website) will still pass just as much juice irrespective of clicks. Correlation does not equal causation.

As the previous replies state it is the link, not the level of clicks that matters. This was the basis of google way back at the start (they were the first to use links in this way), well before google analytics.

Thank you for all your answers!

Stefan Yambolov said:

I've been doing a campaign for getting contextual backlinks mainly form guest posts.

My question is, If no one clicks the link inside the article, does that give any juice? Is value determined by traffic in this case?

Thank you.

Click to expand...

as long as your link is getting indexed and site is good enough it has a value.

This is a very interesting question, unfortunately no one can tell for sure. Some SEOs think that links aren't that important anymore and Google focuses on the user experience. (Bounce rate, session duration). Of course they got this data only for a few users that are logged in and/or pages that run analytics. But 75% of the users use chrome and sure quite a few have "Make searches and browsing better" ticked and are reporting visited URLs to google. Remember you don't have to ask 200 Mio people to predict the result of an election, a few thousands may be enough if you chose the right ones and got enough data about them.

That may be a reason why ranking pages seems to take forever, because google needs to build up a test set of users first. Did you ever notice that you get SERP clicks on some keywords where your average ranking is 100 something? These may be tests where google is showing your page for that key in the top SERPs to known user groups (but without telling you). Also there are no standard search results anymore, they differ by country, region etc. And did you ever find you page in the top 10 with the remark "you visited this page before"?

So I guess there is more to it than just links. Just because that makes sense, if google got that data, why shouldn't they use it?
Of course this only works for static content pages. There are different rules for viral content and news. Links might be important for a short term ranking, but I guess for long term results, the user experience has to be better than that of competing pages.

In the future, links will probably get even less important.

no need any click for pass juice