Why does LinkJuice use 0.85 as the damping factor?

[dev_sara]

I noticed the damping factor is set to 0.85. Can I change this? What happens if I use 0.9 instead?

[chris_seo]

0.85 is the value from the original PageRank paper and is the industry standard. Higher values (like 0.9) make hub pages even more dominant; lower values flatten the distribution. For comparative analysis within a site, the exact value matters less than consistency — just keep it at 0.85 and your scores will be comparable across crawls.

[Ryan]

Just to add to what's been said — I ran into the same issue last month. The key for me was checking the crawl was set to JavaScript rendering mode. That doubled the number of links Screaming Frog found and the LinkJuice PageRank shifted noticeably for several pages.

[Kate]

One thing I'd add: even if the scores look confusing at first, sort by PageRank descending and compare the top 10 against your GA4 sessions. The correlation is usually clear. High-traffic pages should also have high internal PageRank — if they don't, you've found a real problem.