Comments on: Is Link Consolidation An Improvement?

By: Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:20:46 +0000

Hi Lorraine – Thanks for your kind words and being a loyal reader!

By: Lorraine Grula

Lorraine Grula — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:28:52 +0000

Thanks a million for supplying the excellent info that you do on SEO. Speaking as someone who is trying to learn SEO as I learn everything else about internet marketing, it is good to find a place with clear, detailed, accurate, white-hat advice.

From my perspective, it is very confusing because so many people claim to be seo experts and they probably really aren’t. Or they pass black hat crap off as a good idea. I am very glad I got referred to this site.
Lorraine

By: Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:14:09 +0000

Hi Andy – Thanks for your comment…I look forward to hearing more about the new solution you have coming out…thanks!

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:11:01 +0000

Michael and me don’t always agree on PageRank sculpting issues, but I have always advocated that “overhead” pages are better served performing the function of “quarterbacks” thus you might even want more of them, not less.
Each one provides a unique opportunity to link to pages that matter, and whilst there is in theory some form of dampening factor between hops, these pages don’t require additional static navigation and can focus their juice where it counts.

The kind of sculpting I am most fond of is nuking external links on duplicate content pages. I have a new solution for that coming out soon.

By: Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:14:38 +0000

@Michael Martinez – Thanks for reading and your comment. Very good points, especially the one that even Google has stated in the past that incidental pages are important because people search for them…

By: Michael Martinez

Michael Martinez — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:03:31 +0000

The original argument in favor of these amateurish attempts to alter the flow of PageRank through sites was that pages like “About Us”, “Terms of Service”, “Contact Us”, etc. are not important enough to warrant all the PageRank they attract. The SEOs who made this foolish argument should have been ostracized because clearly they were not paying attention to the fact that people actually search for these kinds of pages.

They ARE important — but more importantly, if they are accruing more PageRank than other pages then all one needs to do is leverage these pages to link to less favored content on the site.

Some SEOs also complained that these types of pages tended to outrank other pages. Well, that’s just poor search engine optimization and you can easily remedy that problem without jumping through hoops.

Even people at Google advised the SEO community as ago as 2007 (soon after PageRank sculpting became all the rage) to keep these “incidental” pages in the mix because they really ARE important enough that people search for them.

Add to all this the fact that no one in the SEO community has the ability to track and measure PageRank (meaning none of us knows which pages have how much, which links pass it, and how much is being passed), and the whole concept just falls apart faster than you can say “house of cards”.

Rand seems desperate to rescue one of the most stupid ideas in SEO history from the trash heap of failed techniques, and that’s just a shame. He is capable of pursuing much more worthy goals.