Matt Cutts on PageRank Sculpting

[Kay]

Full Transcript

Matt Cutts on PageRank Sculpting

Rand, In Brighton, and that might be Rand Fishkin, I don't know asks:-

What are your views on 'PageRank Sculpting'?
Useful and recommended if implemented right, or unethical?

Well I wouldn't say it is unethical because it is stuff on your website ? you are allowed to control how the PageRank flows around withing your site.
Erm, I would say that it is not the first thing that I would work on.
I would work on:-

* Getting more links
* Having higher quality content

Those are always the sort of things that you want to do first.

But then if you have a certain amount of budget of PageRank, erm? you certainly can sculpt your PageRank.
I wouldn't necessarily do it with the nofollow tag, although you can put a nofollow on a login page, or something that is customized where a robot will never log in for example, but a better more effective form of PageRank sculpting is choosing for example which things to link to from your homepage.

So imagine you have got two different pages.
You have got one product that earns you a lot of money every time someone buys, and you've got another product where you make? you know 10 cents.

You probably want to highlight this page. You want to make sure it gets enough PageRank that it can rank well.

So this is more likely to be a page that you want to link to from your home page.

So when people talk about PageRank sculpting, they tend to think nofollow and all that sort of stuff, but in some sense the ways that you choose to create your site, your site architecture, and how you link between your pages is a type of PageRank sculpting.
So it is certainly not unethical to have all the links come into your site, and you decide how to link within your site, and how to make the pages within your site.
Erm, I do think that having more links because you have great content is a better way to rank well because it is a second order effect to be sculpting your PageRank.

It can be useful, but it wouldn't be the first thing that I would do.

Please go to the link below to see the video. This is a very detailed blog post and beyond my very limited knowledge of SEO. I'm hoping some of our SEO guys will share their thoughts on the observations within that blog and what Matt said. I know I can learn something here.

Is PageRank Sculpting Dead? Inc. Matt Cutts Transcript

[Niche]

It may soon be that we will not be able to do page rank sculpting. I heard google is going to start following no follow internal links. Or at least count them towards your internal linking structure so the link juice is still evenly distributed

Page rank sculpting I think is a waste of time. I think one of the stomper boys recently released a video on sculpting

My advice to anyone is stick to content generation and building links

[gengye]

Right, Google change its algorithm on PR frequently. But, I do think the nofollow and dofollow links are different for this concept is initiated by Google himself.

[Kay]

It may soon be that we will not be able to do page rank sculpting. I heard google is going to start following no follow internal links. Or at least count them towards your internal linking structure so the link juice is still evenly distributed

Page rank sculpting I think is a waste of time. I think one of the stomper boys recently released a video on sculpting

My advice to anyone is stick to content generation and building links

I agree with you on content, Niche. Where did you hear about the following no follows? I'd be interested in learning more on that. Anyone know anything?

[Niche]

Hi Kay
Gosh this was a while ago. I think it was a Matt Cutts video on webpronews.

I'll have a look around and see if I can find the link

Didn't find the original link but here is another one refering to the same no follow story

Google Changes to No-Follow on the Horizon? | WebProNews