Nofollow, Page Rank Sculpting

[VRI]

A couple of interesting articles related to the nofollow attribute and how it's being utilized within the page rank algorithm... or should I say, not being used. (smiley here)

Search Engine Land
Jim Boykin

[stevetrang]

Thanks for the great info. I wonder how much time people really put into page sculpting. I always thought it was just too much work, but maybe I'm just lazy.

[VRI]

Personally, I never considered it page rank sculpting but have consistently used the nofollow attribute for pages that had value for visitors but wouldn't add any value to the index (terms of service, privacy policy, contact, paginated results, etc.)

With the revelation from Google that the page rank that would be assigned to those nofollowed links is just lost, instead of being transferred to the other links on the page, it doesn't make any sense to nofollow most of them anymore.

By sending the bots to the contact page, even though the page doesn't add any value to the index, it will keep the page rank in the system by spreading it from the internal links on that page.

Where it becomes a bit of a hassle is with forums, I'm going through mine and removing the links entirely from the profiles, printer friendly, etc. when they were simply nofollowed before. (Doesn't make any sense to have the indexing resources wasted on thousands of redundant pages)

[Dallas Broker]

very interesting article, here is another expanding on paid links

http://searchenginewatch.com/3630355

[Bigtoe]

We talked about this a year or 2 ago and I took a bunch of heat for saying pr sculpting didn't work. Gaming the system is not what they are looking for.

[VRI]

Apparently, it did up until recently. (smiley here)

[Discover Davis Homes]

Here is some additional clarification on the PR Scultping issue from Matt Cutts: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

What's interesting is that the change to nofollow was made over a year ago and nobody noticed.

[Halfdeck]

nofollow PageRank sculpting is dead, but my guess is Matt's announcement will force more people into PageRank sculpting (via other means), not less. Why? Because the ROI of PageRank sculpting for some people (especially high traffic bloggers) have suddenly gone up. For example, say you write a hot blog post that gets 10,000 backlinks, but you also get 200 comments, and you only got 20 internal links on that page. That means 90% of link juice flowing into that page including juice from other pages on your domain leaves the site instead of flowing into other internal pages.

That's not necessarily a bad thing in terms of ranking - you still got a bunch of anchor text pointing at that page. But if you are shooting for deep index penetration (e.g. have as many IDX pages in the main index as possible - not in the supplemental index) - you could use that extra link juice. But most real estate sites won't have an issue because in general I don't see them linking out all that much on every page.

While removing nofollows isn't necessarily a bad idea, Vanessa Fox pointed out that nofollows can still faciliate crawling. Google will only crawl a limited number of pages from a site a day (you can see the average in Webmaster Tools). That number depends on your domain's total link juice and also partly on how often you update your site. So you can help get your most recent and important pages crawled before less important pages by moderating Googlebot's crawling behavior using nofollow as well as other things like setting crawl frequency in sitemap XML.

It also means that sites like Wikipedia and Trulia that were previously seen as PageRank horders are actually giving away a ton of link juice to the rest of the web, since Matt seems to suggest that nofollow PageRank gets redistributed to the rest of the web (at least that seems to be the popular interpretation of what he said).

Bottom line is this announcement isn't something a small-medium site owners need to be concerned with too much IMO.

Here are a few other discussions you might find interesting:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-sa...-with-nofollow

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3934042.htm

http://windrosesoftware.com/sculpting

[Bigtoe]

Apparently, it did up until recently. (smiley here)

So did reciprical linking.

[urbansherpa]

I have heard a lot of different opinions on this one. My friend who runs an SEO company says it has its benefits even though it is time consuming and mindless work.