On Thursday, my article Sculpting Your PageRank For Maximum SEO Impact was published in Search Engine Land. In it, I describe the SEO technique of distributing the PageRank you have garnered in a strategic manner, so that the most important pages on your site get a larger slice of PageRank than your inconsequential pages (e.g. Legal Notices, Privacy Policy, Order Status, Customer Help Center, Testimonials, Email Us, View Shopping Cart, My Account, FAQ, About Us, and Shipping Info). This technique is valid for low-value outbound links too, such as “Click to Verify” VeriSign and HackerSafe seals. Doing so will save a larger share of PageRank for the remaining links to your more important pages (e.g. category pages and top-selling product pages).
I consider “sculpting” the flow of PageRank through one’s site through the use of nofollows to be one of the more untapped SEO opportunities. Indeed, in my impromptu analysis of the home pages of the Internet Retailer “Hot 100 Retail Websites,” I found only one retailer of the 100 to be sculpting PageRank with rel=nofollow to any serious degree.
For more tips about PageRank sculpting, check out my full article.
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Interesting article. Thanx for posting.
A truly novel idea… Worthy of further consideration.
I was interested by this concept after SES San Jose and have tried to employ it for “inconsequential” pages such as the ones you listed. Subsequently, I actually saw rankings drop around certain (non-brand)terms. At that time, I read a post by Michael Martinez debating the effectiveness of this tactic (http://www.seo-theory.com/wordpress/2007/11/26/seo-nonsense-sculpting-pagerank-builds-muscle/). Out of curiousity, I removed the nofollows. The rankings improved again. At this point, I’m not so confident about this tactic. Any thoughts?
Hi John,
I am familiar with Michael’s post. I read it and Pocket SEO’s (http://pocketseo.com/google/77) post too before I wrote my article for Search Engine Land. Despite their cogent arguments against the concept of “PageRank sculpting,” I believe it was an important tactic to write about. Like anything in SEO, it should be tested. In our testing, we found occasions where the tactic yielding significant rankings and traffic improvements. So we like it! 🙂
Greetings From SEO-SOLUTIONS.NET
That would be nice posted topic… as on the field of Search engine optimization marketing i don’t give much attention for page rank. I do focused in ranking of my keywords but PR are good in some other way just like in link exchange where most of the webmaster are looking on page rank.
But Stephen, Don’t you think – using nofollow at too many places will give a clear indication to Google that the website owner is an SEO and is trying to use nofollow tags to influence his Google rankings. Does Google officially propagates the usage of nofollow tags for ranking?
I read your article.It’s very nice &
informative.
your idea is very nice.