Comments on: Hooking Up Your Hyperlink Rel and Not Following It

By: Seth Ellsworth

Seth Ellsworth — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:24:14 +0000

Perfect timing for this post eh? Thanks for the comment and for your point of view. This post went live one day before Mr. Cutts drops a bomb on relnofollow and yesterday I get a “BZZT!” He has definitely started a massive debate about this subject. At SEO.com we haven’t really used “PR sculpting” with our clients though we do quite regularly nofollow documents we don’t want to receive any PR. We don’t use it much not because it doesn’t work in some cases, but because it’s usually not necessary. There is data to support that PR sculpting works.

Here are a few posts about this:

SEOMoz
SearchEngineWatch
SearchEngineLand

The jury is still out about what Matt Cutts said. Even so, if what he said is true, then “PR Sculpting” will become completely superfluous. In any case, I would still want to nofollow/noindex pages like the privacy policy and the TOS. I personally don’t care to have all the legalese indexed and in the past, on most of my personal sites, i don’t include the sitewide navigation on those nofollowed/noindexed pages. In the future, if what Matt Cutts says is true, a simple noindex would work just fine because it would make more sense to not limit the PR that is passed through a site.

By: Dave Bascom

Dave Bascom — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:05:55 +0000

Honestly, I’ve never been a huge advocate of pagerank sculpting. In theory, it makes sense (or at least it did before MC’s announcement at SMX), but I usually didn’t see a need to do it on sites that don’t have a bunch of fluffy, useless pages. Plus, if a page is out there on the public web should be indexed and searchable, so I just feel like nofollow has always been lame. Besides, I have a hard time believing that rel=nofollow has cut down comment spam, which was the original intent, because I still get tons of comment spam every single day, and I’m sure everyone does. Fortunately Askimet catches most of it, but the volume coming in is still substantial.

The SEO world is abuzz talking about this change and what it means. @Toni not sure this puts an end to pagerank sculpting, but it certainly adds a new twist and intensifies the controversy about it. I know a lot of people who don’t necessarily believe what Matt said, or at least don’t feel like we’re getting the full story.

By: Toni Anicic

Toni Anicic — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:09:45 +0000

@Michael Martinez,

That’s exactly what I was just about to write in comment about Matt Cuts putting the end on the PageRank Sculpting at SMX Advanced

By: John S. Britsios (aka Webnauts)

John S. Britsios (aka Webnauts) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:34:18 +0000

@Michael Martinez

PageRank Sculpting dead?

Then please explain me this: If page A has a followed link to page B, and the page B has a meta robots tag with a “noindex” directive, and page B has a link back to page A. What should to happen in that case?

By: Michael Martinez

Michael Martinez — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:18:06 +0000

“You probably don’t want to pass pagerank to your privacy policy, terms of service, or disclaimers. Who cares if those rank for anything, ever.”

BZZT! Bad advice. Privacy policies and terms of service pages, at least, are types of content that people actually search for. It’s better to include your basic site navigation on those pages to help the PageRank flow through the site.

PageRank Sculpting has had its day as an SEO myth but now Googler Matt Cutts has said at the latest SMX Advanced conference that if you are nofollowing your own internal links the PageRank will just vanish rather than be reallocated to your other internal links.

Of course, no one has ever been able to show that they could make PR sculpting work anyway. There is no way for anyone outside of Google to measure and track PageRank flow — and if you cannot map how the PageRank flows through your site, you cannot sculpt it.

It’s time for this SEO myth to die.

By: David

David — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 08:16:37 +0000

I never thought of adding nofollow to the privacy policy, terms of service and what not.

Thanks!!!!

Also I did not know that adding too many links distributes the page rank authority…

Double Thanks

I’m a better wiser SEO guy now