Comments on: Matt Cutts Kills Internal Pagerank Sculpting With Nofollow?

By: Nathan

Nathan — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:04:46 +0000

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?

By: small ant

small ant — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:26:01 +0000

I think this nofollow tools for PR sculpturing was stupid idea from the beginning.

By: Shaun Anderson

Shaun Anderson — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 05:42:49 +0000

Thanks to everybody who’s taken the time to comment on ths post – I appreciate it

By: Shaun Anderson

Shaun Anderson — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 05:40:56 +0000

Richard. No. No. Marketing value? That depends on the site. For me, it’s all about PEOPLE. Real people.

By: Richard

Richard — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:40:10 +0000

Should link builders pursue nofollow links? do the nofollowed links needto have contextual relevance to your URL with measurable marketing value.?

By: Jeet

Jeet — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:18:13 +0000

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.

By: Shaun Anderson

Shaun Anderson — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:40:08 +0000

I might actually thow it up on my personal blog for a Spin

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:16:22 +0000

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.

By: Dave Ash

Dave Ash — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:31:40 +0000

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:

“Iâ€™ll do the rest of my blog post in the framework of â€œclassic PageRankâ€ but bear in mind that itâ€™s not a perfect analogy.”

Yet people still obsess about it, even if by Google’s own admission it’s not accurate.

By: Heidi Cool

Heidi Cool — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:24:45 +0000

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.

By: Shaun Anderson

Shaun Anderson — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:10:58 +0000

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

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:01:31 +0000

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.

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:50:46 +0000

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.

By: Andy Williams

Andy Williams — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:42:46 +0000

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.