09 June 2009 | Author: W. Godfrey SEO Consultant

PageRank Sculpting: The Fall of PageRank Sculpting

PageRank Sculpting has been around since the middle ages of search. In 2007, the SEO world was revolutionised as it became popular with advanced SEOs and, over the last week, Matt Cutts - Google's very own oracle of search - made an announcement that will change the way webmasters prioritise certain pages for natural performance.

So what is PageRank sculpting?

On any given site, webmasters will have an idea of which pages they would like to perform well on search engines. For example, on a travel website, destination pages and holiday offers would be important while pages such as terms and conditions and the privacy policy shouldn't really rank as promotional pages. PageRank sculpting is a tactic that effectively prevents certain links on your web page from passing on any authority. Links are generally blocked by using the rel="nofollow" attribute, however, some webmasters have also utilised JavaScript as a means of stopping PageRank from flowing to certain pages.














It has always been well known that links within JavaScript could not be followed as they were invisible to Google. Last week Matt Cutts dropped the bombshell at SMX Advanced by announcing that Google will now distribute PageRank through nofollow links. As a result, PageRank Sculpting will no longer stem the flow of PageRank. This means that all links on every page will receive equal distribution of PageRank, even if they are nofollowed or blocked through JavaScript.

Last week also saw SEO expert Vanessa Fox providing an in-depth report on how Google can now handle the "onClick" JS function, as well as flash, meaning that such links can also be followed.

So where does the PageRank go if the nofollow attribute is in place? It is widely discussed that there is a dead-node that extracts the PageRank distribution but does not pass it on to the destination page. This very fact would mean that using the nofollow attribute would only dilute the PageRank distribution to valuable pages considerably - the art of PageRank sculpting as we know it would be rendered obsolete.

As the Zen saying goes; "no snowflake ever falls in the wrong place". This could be the moment we've all been waiting for. PageRank sculpting has made some webmasters so obsessed with the science of in and outbound linking that they have forgotten to pay any attention to their customers.

This brings to light a new way to look at Google - not as a link engine, but as a citation engine. If you give people a reason to reference you or talk about you, they will. With the rise of social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, forums, blogs etc, the consumer now has a voice that speaks loud and clear. They will reference and link to products, brands and websites when a service or product is good or bad. The point here is that when a brand or domain is mentioned, the search engines will start to pass value on to the referenced site. So when a person links to your domain through Twitter, contextual value may be passed to your domain even if there is a nofollow in the link.

Google has recognised that websites should be judged by accessibility, good relevant content written for the user, site structure and above all word of mouth reputation.

Home | Careers | RSS | Contact Us | Newsletter

International sites: