R.I.P. PageRank Sculpting: If Matt Says So…

July 26, 2010 by Pablo Palatnik

Over the past two years or so, many SEOs have been debating PageRank sculpting. What exactly is Pagerank sculpting for those of you who don’t know?

“Search engine optimization professionals started using the nofollow attribute to control the flow of PageRank within a website, but Google since corrected this error, and any link with nofollow attribute decreases the PR that the page can pass on. This practice is known as “PageRank sculpting”. This is an entirely different use than it was intended originally. nofollow was designed to control the flow of PageRank from one website to another. However, some SEOs have suggested that a nofollow used for an internal link should work just like nofollow used for external links.” states the no-follow wiki page.

From what I’ve personally seen in the past months (almost a year now) I think pagerank sculpting is dead and even more, I think there may be possible penalization. Please note these are just my opinions and I can’t guarantee facts, only from what I see myself. What do you think?

Matt Cutts, as stated above for those who don’t know if one of Googles main, if not, THE main search engineer to the SEO community, has talked about pagerank sculpting before. Let’s look at two videos from 2009 and one very recent from 2010.

I guess when we’re discussing pagerank sculpting, we’re really talking about placing the rel=nofollow tag on certain links on your website to keep the link juice all condensed in one place. I have seen it boost rankings in the past, not so much anymore at all.

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