Does Your Search Engine Optimization Program Include Sculpting PageRank

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 7 of June , 2008 at 6:29 am

Interesting discussion on audette media relating to search engine optimization and sculpting PageRank using NoFollow. There are eight valid points made in post that are well worth reading. I won’t rehash them here, however there are several points that need to be made.

In a nutshell, using a sculpting technique as part of your search engine optimization program is designed to deliver ‘link juice’ to areas of your website. The theory is that you can a preferred pages over less preferred pages.

Sometimes you need to use nofollow.
Whilst the arguments made are valid, there are obvious situations where you not only want, but need to use the nofollow tag to prevent the flow ‘link juice’. A good example would be your print friendly pages. While you can use the NoIndex tag to prevent duplicate content issues, these pages do not require any ‘link juice’. If these pages remain with a zero rank, thats fine - you don’t need them to appear in the SERP’s.

The second reason I would use the nofollow tag to control the flow of ‘link juice’ is where you have more than one link to the same page, particular on your main page. The most important link will be a link within your content. If you also have menu with links to internal pages, you don’t want those links being followed with potentially little reward.

Management tool
One of the points made, 3. It Introduces Management Headaches, has a strong counter argument. Well planned and carefully implemented controls on your internal links can, in the long run, prevent management headaches. Uncontrolled use of nofollow will, I agree, lead to problems over time - careful search engine optimization planning is the key.

The final point I make relating to his post is the emphasis that search engine optimization focuses too much on the search engines and not enough on the user. The post has several quotes on this topic with that same theme - user focused content. I would remind readers of one of our previous post on Google’s Search Engine Optimization Documentation where Matt Cutts states:

Instead, the spirit of that guideline is that users should be the primary consideration. But it is fine to do some things that don’t affect users but do help search engines.

So I have two comments - first, search engine optimization, whether it is link sculpting or keyword research etc, is all about search engines. Secondly, Google themselves recognize that these tactics are used to help/hinder/control search engine spiders. Some tactics have full approval, some tacit approval whilst others are severely frowned upon.

Is sculpting right?
Every search engine optimization expert will have their own view on the subject. There are those who do spend a lot of time on sculpting, and I agree that often their time could be better spent elsewhere. Minor sculpting is necessary to keep your site on track and traveling in the right direction. It is also a good search engine optimization management tool. Like all things in life, too much is going to be a bad thing - managed properly and its going to be effective.

                      Category: PageRank                      

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