PageRank Sculpting – Something to Avoid or Not?

Following my recent post on follow and nofollow, I figured that the timing is just about right to talk about this subject. PageRank Sculpting (SEO terminology) is a way of managing your internal links (or links within your website) with nofollow tags, for the purpose of distributing page or link strength to specific pages or anchor text within a website. The objective of Sculpting is to focus on links that are relevant, in order to control the flow of PR juice on a given website, and thus, increasing the possibility of achieving higher rankings on pages an owner wants, in search engines.

While I am no SEO expert, I do know how to look for information available on the internet. Recently, I found an excellent article written by Ben of UK Search Engine Marketing, that answers with authority, whether or not PageRank Sculpting can cause penalty or problems with google. The article includes an excerpt from an interview made with Matt Cutts (head of Googles Webspam Team) himself, and also the opinion of not one, but ten SEO Experts. Opinions received from, Aaron Wall, Jane Copland, Rand, Andy Beal, just to name a few, answered two questions that Ben emailed to them:

Question 1. Do you use rel=”nofollow” on internal site structure for your sites and or clients?
Question 2. Do you think the use of rel=”nofollow” tags internally is a giant red flag to Google that on its own, or in combination with other flags, might cause a penalty or problems?

And finally, here is an excerpt of a question and response, made directly by Rand of SEOmoz to Matt Cutts:

The question: Does Google recommend the use of nofollow internally as a positive method for controlling the flow of internal link love?

Matt Cutts responded with: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links..

There you are. If you want to control PageRank on your site, this is a must read. One of the best articles I have seen on the internet, by far. The link… PageRank Sculpting – Ok Or Penalty Material? 10 SEO Experts Respond.

Control the flow of your PR and increase your chances to rank better on the SERPs to get more traffic. As you know, more traffic equals Making Money Online🙂

PageRank Sculpting
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