PageRank Sculpting Brings Misery and Peril to All
If you work in the SEO industry or practice search engine optimization, unless you have been sleeping under a rock for the past three years you should know about the PageRank Sculpting debate. PageRank Sculpting was put forth in mid-2007 as a solution to poor Website design problems after Google announced it had used the “rel=’nofollow’” link attribute to “sculpt” PageRank on YouTube. Google’s concern was that it did not want freshly posted videos to earn huge amounts of PageRank before they scrolled off YouTube’s front page. Most new videos never attract much attention and therefore are not really important, but Google’s PageRank algorithm attempts to measure the importance of Web content by weighing links.
Some people in the SEO community assumed this would be a good technique for fixing problems where the wrong pages appeared in search results. They victimized so-called incidental pages like About Us, Contact Us, Terms of Service, and Privacy Policy by alleging that these pages were drawing off too much PageRank from more important pages. Their answer was to slap “rel=’nofollow’” on most if not all links pointing to these pages, thus launching the controversial PageRank Sculpting movement. The immediate results, unbeknownst to the less-than-wiley PageRank sculptors, was near disaster for many Websites who started dropping important content from the search indexes.
Google apparently moved quickly to intervene, according to Google employee Matt Cutts in a series of June 2009 interviews and disclosures, by “evaporating” the Pagerank from nofollowed links, distributing it to all pages in the index. Googlers hoped the SEO community — who claimed to be actively monitoring and testing the sculpted search results — would realize what had happened and stop trying to sculpt PageRank. But no one noticed. The SEO community’s testing proved to be completely ineffective at determining how ineffective PageRank Sculpting was. Hence, over the summer of 2009 Google came clean and advised everyone to stop sculpting their PageRank because it did not work.
PageRank Sculpting has always had its critics within the SEO industry. Some of the most important, well-known SEO folk like Shari Thurow and Adam Audette and Vanessa Fox were dubious about PageRank Sculpting from the start. They wrote thoughtful pieces attempting to dissuade their SEO peers from trying the technique. Matt Cutts and his peer Adam Lasnik had advised people on several occasions to use alternatives to PageRank Sculpting. It seems few people heeded that good advice.
In fact, as it turns out, even now in the wake of Google’s startling disclosure last year some people are still promoting new PageRank Sculpting techniques — techniques, according to SEO expert Michael Martinez, that are even more perilous than the original method. Unlike “rel=’nofollow’” these new methods of hiding links may not be detected by search engines. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! may not be able to intervene and protect Websites from harming their search listings. So the best thing to do, perhaps, is not to attempt PageRank Sculpting at all. In fact, Martinez warns that some SEOs may be sued by angry clients if they are not careful.