Tue 16 Jun 2009
Matt Cutts Kills Internal Pagerank Sculpting With Nofollow?
Blurb by Shaun Anderson (Hobo)Google’s Matt Cutts is attempting to clarify PR Sculpting using Nofollow for the rest of us after the recent hulabaloo surrounding his comments at a SEO conference a short time ago.I’d long fell out of love with PR sculpting internal pages using nofollow as the results were not worth it for me on the sites I worked on (some are quite large) – last April I posted this about PR sculpting:
As I have said, I’ve been playing about with rel=â€nofollow†on this site for 4 months, and in all honesty, in future, I won’t be relying on nofollow to sculpt unimportant pages out of any possible link graph, just optimising those pages better, or leaving them out altogether, like I used to do in 1999. It can be a useful tool in a site redevelopment, but from here on in, I’ll be keeping nofollow for bad neighbourhoods and, pending further testing, on top level blog pages, using Andy Beard’s Nofollow Dupes (ED – actualy that’s back for now for externals) although this site is still a linky love / dofollow blog (for regular contributers at any rate). (ED As Matt Cutts said that’s OK to reward regular contributers)
In June 2008 I posted this about Nofollow and PR Sculpting:
I tested it, and as far as I am concerned, on a 300 page site at least, any visible benefit is microscopic.
A lot of SEO seem really worried about this supposed change. I’m not. I won’t be changing my blog comments, I won’t be worrying about which pages pass PR, I still think you only need a TINY amount of PR for a page to rank and then it’s down to the other stuff like link diversity and anchor text. Why should the normal guy worry about passing PR? Most sites are designed to rank, not help others.
I’m still going to link out freely, and use a blog as it’s meant to be used regardless of how Google’s changed PR (unless my rankings tank of course!). If I want to make sure pages have PR, er, I’ll link to them often in a sensible navigation structure.
Sometimes I wonder if people even ever needed to hear about Google PR nevermind the “science” LOL of PR sculpting in the first place.
Anybody who reads this blog knows I test things for myself because frankly I’m just like everybody else – I don’t know the lot, nobody does, but if you’re relying on heresay and other people’s unpublished experiements without testing yourself, you’re always going to be in the dark.
In theory PR sculpting sounds cool, in practice, it is very dissapointing. Some people think it works, and perhaps on their sites it might – who knows. I remember one SEO saying at the turn of a year it worked and showing the benefits of it in terms of Google traffic. I checked my sites over the same time and recognised a slight increase in Google traffic over the same period – without any sculpting. But you never know, do you?
What do you think?
Did you know when you link to a Hobo SEO post we have search engine friendly links back to your site if approved? Our comments are also search engine friendly you know (once you've commented on a few posts)! Do you need any more encouragement to get involved in the conversation ;)
I have to agree, I think this is all a load of noise about nothing.
According to Matt Cutts, this was all put into place a year ago, no one noticed so it couldn’t have had much of an effect could it. So to start panicing and reacting to it now would be a waste of time. If nothing happened to your rankings, be it good or bad, a year ago, then it’s no big deal is it.
I completely agree with you as well. Of course I’ve been following along with a lot of what you’ve talked about on this blog for the past couple months or so as you’ve helped me out a bit with the startup of my new site. I haven’t used the nofollow tag for any pages on my site just used simple structural (navigation) linking techniques between pages of my blog and I’ve seen traffic increase every week since inception – six weeks in a row. I don’t think it’s worth spending the time and energy on this when you can spend the same time working on the content and navigation of the site and realize even more benefit.
To paraphrase, I think you said on one other page of your site (forgive me if I’m thinking of someone else) that would you rather work on squeezing a few more visitors out of Google by working your butt off on sculpting or simply leverage more traffic from Google by working on content creating better content. I’d take the second.
I have switched to Disqus for a while to encourage others to do so, because it will provide some limited additional links back, and is something anyone can do.
At a later date I have some better solutions that will actually boost search still giving link love.
Nofollow those dupes is going to get a revamp.
Howdy Andy I had spotted your article and gave it a quick scan. It’s on my list later when I get a minute to read everybody’s responses.
I doubt I’ll be switching to anything for now I’m happy with Linky Love.
Good to see you blogging again
I think it’s very helpful that Matt Cutts continues to educate us on the various nuances of Google, it helps us put everything into perspective. And I agree that many people are overthinking things like PR sculpting and even page rank itself (i.e. they’re not putting these into proper perspective.)
Brian is right, the key is content. Everything we do for onsite SEO should make our wonderful content more findable but we really need to focus our SEO efforts on the tactics that will make the most impact. A page rank of 10 isn’t our goal, neither is the #1 spot on the seach results page for term X.
Our real goals are to sell more widgets, build our brand, increase blog subscribers or whatever we define for our given site. Our strategy to achieve such goals is to increase traffic from visitors in our target audience. SEO is one of many marketing tactics we can use to do this. In the end the boss won’t give you a raise (or shouldn’t) for increasing PR from 3 to 6, but he should if you increase sales by 50%–no matter what the PR may be.
It’s important to structure our code correctly and use the right keywords, but sculpting page rank seems to go beyond what is practical and efficient. I’d much rather spend my time on things that give visitors a reason to visit or link to my site. If we focus on readers instead of robots the rest will follow.
I agree with what you say here Sean:
“Sometimes I wonder if people even ever needed to hear about Google PR nevermind the science of PR sculpting in the first place.”
Far too many people place some sort of massive SEO emphasis on the green PR indicator in their toolbar, even though when you go to find out more you only ever read that it’s not a useful indication of anything and should never be relied upon, even Matt Cutts says that that article when he says:
“I’ll do the rest of my blog post in the framework of “classic PageRank†but bear in mind that it’s not a perfect analogy.”
Yet people still obsess about it, even if by Google’s own admission it’s not accurate.
Dig around Disqus a little, think of it as lots of comment blogs on subdomains. It gets more interesting if they can be encouraged to SEO a little.
I might actually thow it up on my personal blog for a Spin
Well, most problematic outcome of this change is PR points leaking even for nofollow links. That means any popular/authority blog that mentions your site may not be passing a lot of link juice because it has 100s of comments (even if they are nofollow).
I will continue to nofollow my login pages etc.
Should link builders pursue nofollow links? do the nofollowed links needto have contextual relevance to your URL with measurable marketing value.?
Richard. No. No. Marketing value? That depends on the site. For me, it’s all about PEOPLE. Real people.
Thanks to everybody who’s taken the time to comment on ths post – I appreciate it
I think this nofollow tools for PR sculpturing was stupid idea from the beginning.
Playing with internal no follow links to sculpt PR just seems like too much of a hassle. Arrn’t the new search engines like bing going to have “better” SERPs to get you to the good content rather than just what some webmaster wants you to see?