PR Sculpting, Siloing, and nofollow

[Optic]

I'm curious what your opinions are about using nofollow internally to silo content and sculpt pagerank.

Some, like Bruce Clay say to use no follow when linking to off topic pages. Others, like Matt Cutts, and some of my more experienced friends say to let it flow.

Matt Cutts recently said in a video that nofollowed links are not subtracted from the number of links calculated to distribute juice to, instead they just remove that amount from the total flow, effectively leaking PR.

What do you think?

[kgun]

What do you think?

That you could start your post by explaining to the average user what is meant by:

1. silo content
2. sculpt pagerank

Matt Cutts recently said in a video that nofollowed links are not subtracted from the number of links calculated to distribute juice to, instead they just remove that amount from the total flow, effectively leaking PR.

Which video?

It can be an interesting discussion if you follow up IMO.

[Optic]

Thanks for the reply. I'd be happy to explain.

Siloing and sculpting are similar.

Siloing basically means that you build buckets of related content, and only link to other content on your site that is in the same bucket. What this does is keeps the relevancy going to only the content that is related to it.

Siloing example - You have a website about grass. You sell grass seed, and lawnmowers. While they are related topics, they have completely different keywords. You would want to only link to grass seed pages from other grass seed pages. Linking to lawnmowers from grass seed pages only delutes your relevancy, and wastes links. The idea with nofollowing, is that you can link to grass seed from lawnmowers, but use a nofollow tag so the search engine doesn't think that your grass seed pages are about lawnmowers. You can take this even further, by only linking to the main page you want to rank for grass seed, and not linking to the other grass seed pages from that target page, or nofollowing the links out from it.

Content siloing is a technique developed by Bruce Clay.

PR sculting is similar, but basically is just a way of controlling where the link juice goes on your website. There's not much point in sending links to pages that you don't care to rank, aside from UI reasons, when you can use the PR on pages you do want to rank.

I use the terms PR, and link juice to describe the flow of authority and relevance through links. I realize that Google PageRank is very unreliable at best, and not the best way to judge a website or page.

Here is the video I was referring to. Which actually explains a little of what I was talking about.

[kgun]

I use the terms PR, and link juice to describe the flow of authority and relevance through links. I realize that Google PageRank is very unreliable at best, and not the best way to judge a website or page.

You have to know what Google PageRank is http://www.ams.org/samplings/feature...fcarc-pagerank and more specially what the toolbar pagerank mean. A thermometer mesure temperature in a geo point, nothing more, nothing less. But non the less it is a mapping from a unknown high dimensional non-linear dynamic system to a simple interval on the real line.

For more information go to

http://www.webproworld.com/webmaster...?search_type=1

Keyword(s): pagerank

User Name: kgun

hit the search now button.

repeat with the same user name and

Keyword(s): inverted link matrix

[Optic]

Do you have any opinion on my question?

[kgun]

I may come back later with my view. You may find some input and older WPW threads like this

http://www.webproworld.com/webmaster...l=1#post364158

one by Googling:

pr sculpting incredible help.

Are you able to write a summary / conclusion?

[Optic]

Thanks. That looks like a good read. I guess the mods can delete this useless thread.

edit - I just noticed the red text at the bottom that says "This thread has not had a response in the last two months. Consider starting a new thread."

[Doc]

Optic-

In your original post, you made mention of the fact that Matt had said that

nofollowed links are not subtracted from the number of links calculated to distribute juice to, instead they just remove that amount from the total flow, effectively leaking PR.

This is correct. Not TOO long ago, a PR5 site with 5 OBLs would have 1/5 of its PR allocated to each OBL, and if you were to make three of them nofollow, the remaining 2 would each be worth 1/2 the total pagerank. Now, however, each OBL would be worth 1/5, whether you "use" it or not. "Use it or lose it" seems to have become the philosophy.

That being said, however, as MJTaylor pointed out, there are circumstances in which nofollow can be advantageous. I think the point is, it's more difficult to take advantage of that on a site with 5-10 pages, than it would be, on a site with 100 or more pages.

I'm curious what your opinions are about using nofollow internally to silo content and sculpt pagerank.

Some, like Bruce Clay say to use no follow when linking to off topic pages. Others, like Matt Cutts, and some of my more experienced friends say to let it flow.

Matt Cutts recently said in a video that nofollowed links are not subtracted from the number of links calculated to distribute juice to, instead they just remove that amount from the total flow, effectively leaking PR.

What do you think?

[mjtaylor]

There is a simple answer to using nofollow on your own site.

1. nofollow = No trust (in its base form)

2. Do you really want to tell search engines to not trust your internal links???

3. Just takes a little bit o brain power to see the answer......

;->

While we say nofollow means no trust, we know that what we're really saying is simply don't pass PR. That's all.

In terms of usability links off the page have to also be considered distractions. I personally think that's why Google might be treating nofollow links the same as followed links. If it's on the page is it really something you want your users to focus on, click on and otherwise take action on? Will it lead to helping the user?
Just my two cents.

What makes you think Google treats followed links the same as links with the no=follow attribute?

[mjtaylor]

I would say siloing works well on a larger site - maybe above 100 pages, but is probably unnecessary and not so obviously effective on anything smaller. I also think that despite Matt's suggestion that we let PR flow, he also says we should take care to make sure Google can easily find what the webmaster considers to be the most important pages -- that they should be no more than one click away from the home page. Since usability may place many pages closer to the home page than their importance suggests, it is logical to no follow links like those sometimes.

The most important element of architecture, imo, is ease of navigation. That covers both the human and robotic visitor. File naming is also very important.

Nice thread, by the way.