PageRank Sculpting

Ever heard of the term PageRank Sculpting? Some say it’s the craze of on-site SEO until Matt Cutts came out with the news of its apparent death. So what’s the truth about PageRank sculpting? Or sometimes known as Link sculpting? Can you still use it?

 

PageRank Sculpting is about trying to manipulate your page rank flow in your website through controlling your link juice flow. There are 2 types of links that you need to know: dofollow and nofollow. You sculpt page rank structure by using the nofollow attribute.

For example, you have a webpage with 5 outgoing links. You want all the Page Rank juice to flow to two of those links, so you put the nofollow attribute on the other three. During the earlier years, this could work. Now, it’s leaning more towards a negative implication than a positive one. Why?

Because this technique was abused.

Let me diagram to you in pictures how link sculpting works so you could understand it easier:

This is the normal Page Rank flow within your site. No sculpting involved.

This is how Page Rank sculpting used to be. As you can see, it was a way to put in more page rank juice to specific webpages that you want to rank. It is manipulating the Page Rank flow from one of your pages to another via interlinking and the use of nofollow tag.

This is how Page Rank sculpting looks like today. As you can see, even if you do block the link juice with a nofollow tag attribute, the linkjuice that your other webpages would get is still the same. What the nofollow tag does is that it just cuts out the linkjuice that you could have passed on to a webpage that wasn’t so important. In essence, you don’t gain anything and you lose something. Not a good idea.

The possible page rank that you could have given the webpage is cancelled out and is not re-distributed to the other webpages that you are linking to. So link sculpting is not advised any longer. In fact, the nofollow attribute is now being discouraged. Matt Cutts claims that part of their Ranking Algorithm promotes linking out to other relevant sources.

It’s up to you as to whether to believe him or not. As for me, trial and error is still the only way to go in this ever-changing profession.

Can you still use Link Sculpting?

Well I’ve stumbled upon a site that promises the use of link sculpting as a possibility until today. They claim that you can still ‘game’ Google by putting in a little JavaScript code. Of course, you won’t really know until you try, right?

But just for your curious little minds, I’ve taken the liberty to link to them just for this resource code that they have allowed to go public. You can download it here.

The code isn’t too simple and isn’t too complicated. You need at least a basic knowledge of HTML and PHP to install this code and use nofollow to your advantage.