R.O.I. MEDIA

PageRank sculpting is a useful element to incorporate in any SEO strategy. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, it is simply a manner in which you strategically funnel PageRank to the most important areas of your site.

Let me put it in layman’s terms : If you are stuck in your car without petrol and need to get going by making use of the can of petrol in your boot, you would need a funnel (regard this as a hyperlink) to direct the petrol (the PR juice) into the correct area, which is the petrol tank / car. You will place the funnel so that it directs the petrol into the petrol tank and ultimately flows into the car. Distributing the petrol to where it is not needed, by throwing it on the car’s body or inside of the car, will not get you anywhere.

In this simple comparison above, the much valued petrol is channelled to the correct area by making sure all elements are correctly organised to achieve this. In website terms, however, there is not only one area which you need to funnel PageRank to but quite a large number instead. And as we all know, the more links you have on a page, the more you are diluting the PageRank which you are passing on to each of those pages.

So it becomes very important to have a good balance between having links to various areas of your site on a page for users, and funneling PageRank in such a way that most PageRank is passed to more important areas of your site. Many people still believe that funneling PageRank with the use of a ‘nofollow’ tag is still possible. This is, of course, not true.
In the past (before the summer of 2009), it was fairly easy to tell Google where it should be passing the PageRank and where it should not. The ‘nofollow’ attribute could easily be placed in hyperlinks to ‘divide’ the PageRank distribution between the other links which are not ‘nofollowed’. So for e.g. if you have ‘X’ number of PageRank points on a page with five links and you ‘nofollow’ one link, the old Google algorithm would have treated the distribution as follows:

The amount of passable link juice is now distributed through the remaining four links and Link 2 is now completely disregarded.

As this was way too easy to implement, websites were abusing the right to sculpt PageRank.  Most websites were abusing the ‘nofollow’ attribute in order to horde PageRank for a specific page and Google, rightfully, decided to change its algorithm.

The ‘new’ Google algorithm will handle the same link situation as follows:

It is clear to see that PageRank sculpting is no longer possible via the ‘nofollow’ attribute. If you are making use of this practice, it would be advisable to discontinue this.  Using the ‘nofollow’ attribute to sculpt PageRank could negatively affect your site. My suggestion would be to rather use any of the 3 options below to effectively sculpt the ‘juice’ and keep the Googlebot alarm bells from ringing:

1. An embedded iFrame on the page containing links you don’t want Google to pass PR to (do not link to the iFrame URL, and block it using robots.txt)
2. Links that call a Javascript redirect with access blocked for spiders.
3. Embedded links in Flash, Java or some other non-crawlable plug-in.

Happy sculpting and hope you make a success of your online marketing campaign.