Ever tried PR Sculpting?  Did you find it effective?  Let us know in the comments section.

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Now, PR sculpting is a fairly advanced concept a lot of folks may not fully understand.  So, I figured I would try to provide some explanation of at least the general ideas involved.  That seems like the best way to go about explaining why Google is looking to make some sort of change in their treatment of no-follow.  If you understand PageRank sculpting, on other words, you will get why Google might not like it so much.

I expect I will have at least 5 people ‘way smarter than me’ hop in the comments or rip me in Twitter for leaving out ‘this’ or ‘that’ in terms of the subtle nuances of PR sculpting. My response to this would be; for the purposes of this article, the subtleties are immaterial.  So simmer down.  I would be remiss however if I didn’t add a little warning in here for people to thoroughly read up and make sure you understand PR sculpting before you start slapping no-follows all over your site.  You really can screw your site up if you do it wrong.

So what the heck is it anyway? I’m so glad you asked. We’ll start with the concept of your Page Rank ‘power’ or ‘authority’.  This is the overall ‘value’ of a given page in terms of how much ‘authority’ that page has to pass along via it’s outbound links.  You have no doubt heard people talk about ‘link juice’, that’s what link juice is.  The more important (in Google’s eyes) a page is, the more link juice it possesses.

Now think of your website as a bucket (or maybe an elegant punchbowl or some kind of fine china bowl if a bucket is too base of a mental image for you). Your bucket contains all of your link juice.  Now think of your outbound links as tiny holes in your bucket.  Your link juice flows through the holes and passes on your page’s authority.

Now, the PR sculpting theory holds that the more holes you have in your bucket, the more your link juice is spread around or diluted.  This is at least in part supported by the search engine accepted and approved concept of Crawl Efficiency (see the Vanessa Fox video or article for more on that).  Search engines aren’t going to spend forever crawling and indexing every link on every page, so the concept of crawl efficiency basically means you prioritize the important stuff for them.

How do you do this?  Well you stick no-follow attributes on non-important links.  PR sculpting theory takes this one step further and says that ALL outbound links count as a hole in your bucket, so you would then want to make more liberal use of no-follow to help direct the flow of the link juice.  For example; if you had navigation links at the top of your page, in the side bar and again in your footer, PR sculpting would say you add no-follow attributes to all but one set of them.  Less holes = more juice flowing through the holes that are left.  Get the idea?  Good.

Now, the hullaballoo at SMX Advanced had to do with some rumors or suggestions that Google may be going to change how they look at no-follow in relation to how the link juice is passed along.  So if you had, for example, 10 outbound links on a page and no-followed all but 2 of them, effective PR sculpting would funnel all of your juice through those 2 and not dilute it over all 10.  Google, being… well, Google, doesn’t like to have situations where people can ‘control’ the value of links – especially for the purposes of ranking better in Google.

Does Google need to make changes to manage the effectiveness of PR Sculpting?  What do you think?

So much buzzing and grumbling ensued when it was suggested that Google might not look at no-follow in quite the same way moving forward.  If you have 10 links and no-follow 8 of them in other words, they were still going to count you as having 10 holes in your bucket instead of sending more love to the 2 regular links you didn’t add no-follow to.

By the end of the show, there still hadn’t been much at all in the way of an official word from Google on the subject.  However, I very strongly suspect we will have one soon.  The implications for counting no-follow links ‘against’ you in terms of authority passing ability raises all sorts of difficulties. 

For one, let’s say you have a popular article that gets 500 comments.  Most everybody that leaves a comment also leaves a link.  Generally these links are no-followed.  If more links = some sort of diminished or diluted authority of a page, that would seem to suggest your fantastic article that got 500 comments was maybe not as good as an article that only got maybe 5 comments. 

Second, the whole no-follow thing was Google’s idea to begin with.  It’s very existence is arguably not much more than a Google helper to assist them in managing the whole link economy they created out of their heavy reliance on links as a ranking factor. 

Google hates paid links because paid links have the potential to impact search results and if you can buy links you can essentially raise your result in Google.  The problem is, paid links have been around longer than Google….  we used to just call them ads.  So, Google decided if you slap a no-follow attribute on a link, it meant you were not trying to pass your page authority on to that link and therefore weren’t being paid to elevate said link in their index.

Now, it seems like Google is starting to see people using no-follow to emphasize links via the PR sculpting thing and they want to do something about it.  A cynical person might say they sound like they are trying to have their cake and eat it too…  but a Google person would just say they are just trying to protect the integrity of their index.  Personally, I’m all for Google protecting the integrity of their index…  but I think it gets to a point when maybe they need to do something about their index’s over-reliance on inbound links as a ranking factor. Maybe then they wouldn’t have to sweat this sort of thing quite so much and/or dump the burden of link formatting and management off on the webmasters and the SEOs of the world.  Those guys have enough on their plate as it is.

Do you expect Google will make changes to the way they handle no-follow? Comment below

Please explain to me why millions of websites rank fine without doing this and now all of sudden we should start doing this? Is this to help our websites? Is it to help Google crawl our websites? Will our websites suffer if we don’t do this? I would answer no to most of these questions.

As we all know the nofollow attribute was created as a blog comment spam condom. It was since progressed into a paid link condom and most recently into a tool that webmaster could, should (lol) use to help control PR flow through our websites. Are we to believe that those that are not employing the nofollow tag on our website in some way is going to underperform on Google? Rubbish. Are we to believe that we should just go out and nofollow pages we dont want to rank thinking this will help the pages we do want to rank? Rubbish.

If you never used the follow tag for the rest of your life you will rank fine. True. Focus your efforts on ideas and techniques that a tried and true. Most that think that PR sculpting works have NEVER even tested it.

You don’t have to “sculpt” PR on your website by not passing link juice to your privacy policy, terms of service or about us pages. It is mind blowing to me that you would not want these pages not indexed or ranking for keywords anyways.

I have said before that nofollow seem to be nothing more than a band-aid on poor internal navigation. And SEOs expect to fix this by managing PR flow using nofollow. The whole idea is really crazy making. SEOs want to manage something that they cant even begin to explain. Is a great quote from Micheal Martinez clearly explaining why you can’t do this:

“I would agree that the concept of managing PageRank flow through link sculpting is mathematically acceptable. But PageRank flow is not what people in the SEO community are thinking about. They’re focused on PageRank value, and that’s an entirely different concept.

PageRank flow is a series of events. The flow may occur within one set of calculations or across multiple sets of calculations. Think of each set of calculations as an internal PageRank update. Maybe it happens every day. Maybe it happens every week. We don’t see it.

It’s extremely naive and foolish to propose that anyone in the SEO industry can manage a process none of us can see.

As far as PageRank value is concerned, people in the SEO industry can only look at Toolbar PR data. Whatever that value really means is irrelevant because it’s all we have to work with. It’s not only an imprecise measurement of the actual value Google calculates for a page, it’s not updated very often (recent events notwithstanding, unless Google goes back to more frequent Toolbar PR updates).”

I recently created a post on WPW on this very subject and I am looking for forward to responses:

Does PR Sculpting Work?

WebProNews video also has a nice video from Stephen Spencer on the topic:

SMX West 2008: Stephan Spencer Subscribe to our feed!

I got into a nice discussion on Sphinn recently on the topic as well:

Sphinn: Understanding what the “No Follow” tag can do for your site

Here is the thread that explains what the nofollow tag can do for your website, blaaaah:

Understanding what the “No Follow” tag can do for you

Finally here is the truth on the PR Sculpting ideology from Michael Martinez:

SEO Nonsense – Sculpting PageRank Builds Muscle

SO this is my called out to anyone that can show that PR Sculpting alone is a SEO technique that should be recognize and implemented by most websites. I am sure I won’t get many responses worth anything substantially new on the topic. With good unique content, proper internal navigation and solid back links you don’t need to worry about nofollow.

UPDATE: This post from Micheal Martinez really says it all about this PR Sculpting issue.

Yes, Virginia, your contact page DOES need 500 links – SEO Theory – SEO Theory and Analysis Blog

Point 1 – We live in a bubble. 99% of the world doesn’t know what nofollow is and probably will never know until the W3 add it as proper markup. So are we to believe that Google has granted SEOs ONLY this special attribute that can help us rank better. No. It is only for Google benefit, not ours.

Point 2 – The theory has not been tested enough and probably can’t be properly tested since to many outside forces effect rankings. That is why this 2nd order effect has no bearing. No has proven that spending a few minutes using nofollow helps your website do any better. Google is simply telling you that is will. Google said it was OK to do it, doesn’t mean you should or even if it works. Remember the end benefactor of nofollow is Google themselves, NOT your website.

Point 3 - External nofollow: The web and Google’s algorithm was built on the concept of linking one document to another. Now we should continue to do this, but in way that does not pass search engine value through the link? Who is benefiting here? The SE algo only. This really goes against why the web was built on links.

Point 4 - Internal nofollow: I simply default to this post by Michael Martinez: Yes, Virginia, your contact page DOES need 500 links

Point 5 – PR is not tangible. One page doesn’t have 100 PR credits that you can feel free to divvy up as you like through internal linking. It is not that simple. The point I am trying to make is that these SEOs are trying to say they can sculpt something like PR. We all know toolbar PR is crap and internal PR is not known so…where does one get off saying they can sculpt something they don’t know?

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