Cultivate Search Engine Positioning, Inc.

It was my first SMX Advanced seminar in Seattle, WA and there was simply a ton of useful information given.  In fact I’m just taking the time to update my blog with a recap of my experience and what I found most useful and in some cases most annoying.

However, there was a huge debate when Matt Cutts started talking about PR Sculpting…

Let’s take a step back and explain what PageRank sculpting is and how it’s used by many knowledgeable SEOs (myself included) on certain projects.

Every page on the web can be said to have an intrinsic ‘value’.  If said page has a link on it then that page is passing some of that value elsewhere funneled through that link.  If the page has 5 links then that value is shared ‘equally’ amongst all 5 links.  That’s how PageRank works at it’s most basic core.

However many of us never saw the importance of having certian pages rank well.  For example if you are a self storage facility how often are you looking to rank an about us page in the search results?  How does that page measurably fit into a sales funnel?  Sure it’s nice to have, but we don’t need it ranked.

Enter PageRank sculpting.  We are able with a number of avenues to sculpt the flow of that pages value to not include the about us.  So in the example of the page with 5 links, rather than including sharing the value with it’s about us page we simply sculpt the flow to divide amongst our 4 major pages and in a sense skip the about us page entirely.

The most popular method is nofollow.  By simply adding a chunk of code we can tell the search bot not to pass the juice onto that about us page which in theory makes our other pages stronger.  Remember, we’re only splitting the value 4 ways now and not 5.

Okay so that’s the history or reasoning behind it, now onto current events…

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At SMX Advanced 09 Matt Cutts, the Google quality control guru basically knocked us all off our seats when he said that PageRank  sculpting no longer helps in passing more link value or ‘link juice’  to the other pages; it simply dissipates.  Matt may use a different term but that’s what happens, it discounts the nofollow link however you are no longer passing more value to the others that are not being blocked by nofollow.

Every blog of note nofollows comment links in attempt to keep their link value insite and to help prevent spamming of the comments.

The frustrating thing is, we have other tools in our toolbelt (if you’re dealing with a worth while SEO) to still achieve this sculpting however it breaks that backwards compatability we’ve relied on.  It’s hard enough chasing the algorithm but to have to re-invent methodology that Matt Cutts even recommended at one point is asking a bit much:

My short answer is that the nofollow attribute on links is a pretty
general mechanism, and you’re welcome to use it how you like…

What are some appropriate ways to use the nofollow tag? One good
example is the home page of expedia.com. If you visit that page,
you’ll see that the “Sign in” link is nofollow’ed. That’s a great use
of the tag: Googlebot isn’t going to know how to sign into
expedia.com, so why waste that PageRank on a page that wouldn’t
benefit users or convert any new visitors? Likewise, the “My
itineraries” link on expedia.com is nofollow’ed as well. That’s
another page that wouldn’t really convert well or have any use except
for signed in users, so the nofollow on Expedia’s home page means that
Google won’t crawl those specific links….