It seems the age old habit of carefully trying to channel page rank to certain pages whilst blocking it from others is no longer effective. Matt Cutts has revealed during a Q&A session at SMX Advanced that Google now handles page rank sculpting differently.

In the past, if you had 5 points of page rank that you wanted to control, and six internal pages that could be boosted with that page rank, you could nofollow one page and channel one point to each of the others. It now appears that even though you have nofollowed one page, the others will only receive 5/6 of a point – the nofollowed paged still receives its allocation.

Web Pro News has reported on the Q&A session and one of the most important quotes from Cutts comes from the following: (emphasis added)

Now, instead of having a certain amount juice to distribute as a webmaster likes, Google allows only that select pages be deprived of juice. And where does that all that excess PageRank juice go? “You can almost think of it as just evaporating,”

His advice is to plan your site from day one, nofollow links that don’t need indexing, such as sign-on pages and RSS feed links. Otherwise, Cutts sticks to the general Google line – plan your site for the user, not the search engines and create good content.

Page rank sculpting has only really been useful for those sites that already have a high ranking. For lesser mortals the task of trying to sculpt minute amounts of page rank has really been an exercise in futility.

Your internal link building should be designed to allow easy access for your visitors – in the process the search engines will also find the process easier. A well structured web site is far more valuable in the long term than any benefit obtained by sculpting your page rank. Is the process dead – for most web site owners, the process should never have been alive.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 2:50 am and is filed under Link Building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.