Does PR Sculpting Work?

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

More on PR Sculpting from Greg Boser at SES NYC

Looks like Mr. Greg Boser has access to Google's internal actual PageRank values!!!

Why do I think so?

Well if someone doesn't know his actual PageRank (internal & up-to-date), how can he/she determine how his/her linkage can affect it? Don't you think that is kind of weird?

We can speculate using a tool like PageRank Bot, but that only based on the PageRank we see in the outdated PR toolbar.

So the question again: How can we sculpt our PageRank?

My answer is: Only if you have a disloyal employee at Google as a best friend, who has access to the actual PageRank values, and who would shared them with you.

Peace!

[Peter (IMC)]

You need a vacation Webnauts. Seeing conspiracies now?

You don't have to know what the actual PR values are to know where most of it goes. Just apply the PR logic and you'll know where most of it goes.

Greg by the way is talking about bigger sites and is discussing it might be helpful to keep PR in the top level pages. He's also combining nofollow with noindex.

I don't see a real value here. If somebody links to a noindexed page, that PR value is gone completely. Just pure loss if you ask me. I think he's just talking about a temporary fix in order to get results faster. He's also saying PR of the home page should be like 6 or 7. Who works with those kind of sites? Not me.. So maybe PR sculpting is useful with huge sites that have a lot of PR already, and then only temporary. But for most sites, its just a waste of time if you ask me.

He says Matt Cutts says it is ok to do PR sculpting with nofollow. But what does that mean? To me it simply means he doesn't care what you do with PR. He kind of has no choice but to say that nofollow does not harm a site at all. They've been so fanatic on the nofollow they really can't change that into saying that you can't use it on your own pages..

[Webnauts]

Peter you can be sure that I need vacation more than ever before. But still I must add this here:

Greg Boser said that you should not only use the “nofollow” attribute, but you should combine it with the “noindex” tag.
I am just wondering, if web site owners do not have their physical postal address on every page of their site, but only on their “about us” or “contact” page, and those will not be followed and/or indexed, how trustworthy will the site be considered by search engines?

And what about the local search? If Uncle Joe does not know or use the Google Webmaster Tools for the Geo target, how can he be found in his local area search?


And after all, the whole web is picking up only the one option Matt Cutts mentioned: The “nofollow”! Why doesn’t anyone talk about the second option his mentioned: 302 redirects?


In my opinion, the whole “nofollow” initiative is about SEOs taking over the organic search monopoly.

[janeth]

It sounds like it would work to me. Maybe I am way out in left field but here is my thinking.

1. I’ve always been under the understanding that a link from a pr6 page with no other links leaving that page would be better than a link from a pr7 page with 100 other outgoing links.

2. This would leave me to believe that controlling the number of outgoing links leaving a page would help me control the pagerank.

It seems like if I had a site that sold widgets and most links were pointing at my home page I could nofollow the about us page and push more link juice to my red widget page. I could get a couple external links going to my about us page, building up its pagerank juice and point those links back to my home page and red widget page.

By nofollowing any external links I am keeping all my pagerank for myself. By nofollowing internal links I am controlling the flow of my pagerank. I am not taking my page out of Google because I can get external links pointing back at it.

If I have a picture, a button, and a text link all pointing at my about me page and I nofollow two of them I am now allowing more link juice to flow to my other pages.

Just my two cents.

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by janeth

It sounds like it would work to me. Maybe I am way out in left field but here is my thinking.

1. I’ve always been under the understanding that a link from a pr6 page with no other links leaving that page would be better than a link from a pr7 page with 100 other outgoing links.

2. This would leave me to believe that controlling the number of outgoing links leaving a page would help me control the pagerank.

It seems like if I had a site that sold widgets and most links were pointing at my home page I could nofollow the about us page and push more link juice to my red widget page. I could get a couple external links going to my about us page, building up its pagerank juice and point those links back to my home page and red widget page.

By nofollowing any external links I am keeping all my pagerank for myself. By nofollowing internal links I am controlling the flow of my pagerank. I am not taking my page out of Google because I can get external links pointing back at it.

If I have a picture, a button, and a text link all pointing at my about me page and I nofollow two of them I am now allowing more link juice to flow to my other pages.

Just my two cents.

You don't lose any of your intrinsic PR via outgoing links; such are merely "votes" for others.

And, you don't get to keep and count the PR that you have to pass to others; i.e., you don't get to vote for yourself.

By way of analogy, when someone delegates authority to another, that person does not lose any authority; and, he cannot use his own authority to increase the authority vested in him by others.

[activeco]

Originally Posted by janeth

1. I’ve always been under the understanding that a link from a pr6 page with no other links leaving that page would be better than a link from a pr7 page with 100 other outgoing links.

2. This would leave me to believe that controlling the number of outgoing links leaving a page would help me control the pagerank.

Sure Janeth.
Many 'experts' don't even recognize the original PR idea, freely available:
"PageRank conferred by an outbound link is equal to the document's own PageRank score divided by the normalized number of outbound links."

[janeth]

Originally Posted by deepsand

You don't lose any of your intrinsic PR via outgoing links; such are merely "votes" for others.

And, you don't get to keep and count the PR that you have to pass to others; i.e., you don't get to vote for yourself.

By way of analogy, when someone delegates authority to another, that person does not lose any authority; and, he cannot use his own authority to increase the authority vested in him by others.

I disagree, you do get to vote for yourself. And the more links you have on a page the less pagerank you are able to pass on to the other pages. The pagerank is divided by the outgoing links.

[janeth]

This should help in understanding how pagerank works. Pagerank Explained. Google's PageRank and how to make the most of it.

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by janeth

I disagree, you do get to vote for yourself. And the more links you have on a page the less pagerank you are able to pass on to the other pages. The pagerank is divided by the outgoing links.

You can divide your authority between various parts of yourself, but that is not voting for yourself; how you internally spread your intrinsic PR will not serve to increase your total PR.

And, failing to exercise your ability to vote for others does not result in those uncast votes being counted in your behalf; they are simply lost.

[janeth]

Originally Posted by deepsand

You can divide your authority between various parts of yourself, but that is not voting for yourself; how you internally spread your intrinsic PR will not serve to increase your total PR.

And, failing to exercise your ability to vote for others does not result in those uncast votes being counted in your behalf; they are simply lost.

Do you have any proof of this?

I've seen many pages rank number one for keywords with only one link going to them from the home page of a site.

That would mean that the home page of the site is passing PR to them. I've also seen Google display toolbar PR for pages with only one page (that is on the same site pointing to them).

And on your other point, when you divide your authority you are giving less to each party.

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by janeth

This should help in understanding how pagerank works. Pagerank Explained. Google's PageRank and how to make the most of it.

But, you still need to distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic PR. Without intrinsic PR, everyone starts with nothing, such that their votes count for nothing, and everyone remains having nothing.

[janeth]

Originally Posted by deepsand

But, you still need to distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic PR. Without intrinsic PR, everyone starts with nothing, such that their votes count for nothing, and everyone remains having nothing.

Everyone does start with nothing but gains something every time someone links to them.

Wikipedia's results improved when they started using the nofollow tag.

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by deepsand

By way of analogy, when someone delegates authority to another, that person does not lose any authority; and, he cannot use his own authority to increase the authority vested in him by others.

I think that is a great analogy deepsand.

Janth you really believe PR works that way? Each page has a bucket full of PR footballs and the more that are handed off, the less that page is worth? I highly disagree.

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by janeth

Do you have any proof of this?

I've seen many pages rank number one for keywords with only one link going to them from the home page of a site.

That would mean that the home page of the site is passing PR to them. I've also seen Google display toolbar PR for pages with only one page (that is on the same site pointing to them).

And on your other point, when you divide your authority you are giving less to each party.

Do you have proof otherwise? No one is saying that links dont pass PR internally or externally. We are saying you cant hoard PR by using a made-up technique like PR Sculpting. Their is no proof of it.

Point 1 - We live in a bubble. 99% of the world doesn’t know what nofollow is and probably will never know until the W3 add it as proper markup. So are we to believe that Google has granted SEOs ONLY this special attribute that can help us rank better. No. It is only for Google benefit, not ours.

Point 2 - The theory has not been tested enough and probably can't be properly tested since to many outside forces effect rankings. That is why this 2nd order effect has no bearing. No has proven that spending a few minutes using nofollow helps your website do any better. Google is simply telling you that is will.

Point 3 - External nofollow: The web and Google's algorithm was built on the concept of linking one document to another. Now we should continue to do this, but in way that does not pass search engine value through the link? Who is benefiting here? The SE algo only. This really goes against why the web was built on links.

Point 4 - Internal nofollow: I simply default to this post by Michael Martinez:

Yes, Virginia, your contact page DOES need 500 links - SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog

Point 5 - PR is not tangible. One page doesn’t have 100 PR credits that you can feel free to divvy up as you like through internal linking. It is not that simple. The point I am trying to make is that these SEOs are trying to say they can sculpt something like PR. We all know toolbar PR is crap and internal PR is not known so…..where does one get off saying they can sculpt something they don't know?

[janeth]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

I think that is a great analogy deepsand.

Janth you really believe PR works that way? Each page has a bucket full of PR footballs and the more that are handed off, the less that page is worth? I highly disagree.

I thought it was common knowledge.

PageRank Explained.

A page "votes" an amount of PageRank onto each page that it links to. The amount of PageRank that it has to vote with is a little less than its own PageRank value (its own value * 0.85). This value is shared equally between all the pages that it links to.

From this, we could conclude that a link from a page with PR4 and 5 outbound links is worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and 100 outbound links. The PageRank of a page that links to yours is important but the number of links on that page is also important. The more links there are on a page, the less PageRank value your page will receive from it.

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by janeth