Texas SEO Company Blog

Google Webmaster Central, a few days ago, posted that PageRank sculpting is a waste of time. Today there’s a post over at Search Engine Optimization Journal saying that PageRank sculpting might actually work if your site is big enough. But he’s really repeating what Rand Fishkin said. Who’s right?

I’m going to fall on the side of Webmaster Central. I think for most of us it’s a low pay off activity and you shouldn’t bother.

If you don’t know what PageRank sculpting is, here’s a quick definition: Use nofollow tags in your links to keep search engines from crawling pages that you don’t want crawled for the purpose of cutting off PageRank distribution to those pages and sending it to other pages where you want it to go. The reason webmasters like Rand Fishkin say to do this is because search engines evenly distribute PageRank authority to linked-to sites rather than send the complete PR checkbook to every site being linked to. For instance, if you have a PR 7 web page linking to a PR 5 and A PR 3 then both of those pages being linked to will get a PR 3.5 link credit. If you nofollow one of the links then the other page will get a PR 7 link credit. Perform this equation several times for several pages and you can see that in high numbers you can transfer pretty decent PageRank credits to the pages you want it to go to, but the problem is two-fold:

• Time spent nofollowing your links
• The number of pages on your website

It takes time to go in and add that nofollow tag. For most of us, the pay off is so low that the time spent isn’t worth it. Secondly, most small business websites have so few pages that spending time on such a low pay out activity is worthless. And that’s why webmasters at Google Webmaster Central say don’t both with PageRank Sculpting. I say there are other SEO activities you can spend your time working on.

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