Does PR Sculpting Work?

[watto]

Webnauts, you are one step ahead of the game as usual! You rock man!!

webnauts, I am trying to find a post of yours about the alternative you use to the rel="nofollow", but I cant find it........

[Magnus Vogel]

Well I am sure you have heard of PR hoarding or PR Sculpting by way of the nofollow attribute before, but do they work? Simple answer for me is I don’t know. Do you? I would love to hear from you on this thread then.

[Webnauts]

Webnauts, you are one step ahead of the game as usual! You rock man!!

webnauts, I am trying to find a post of yours about the alternative you use to the rel="nofollow", but I cant find it........

Peter looks like I am 15 months ahead of Google. Evidence? http://www.webproworld.com/search-en...tml#post445087

[Webnauts]

Well I am sure you have heard of PR hoarding or PR Sculpting by way of the nofollow attribute before, but do they work? Simple answer for me is I don’t know. Do you? I would love to hear from you on this thread then.

Google says that PageRank Sculpting works, but not using nofollow: SEOmoz | Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can't Do It With Nofollow

[Doc]

Google says that PageRank Sculpting works, but not using nofollow: SEOmoz | Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can't Do It With Nofollow

Thanks, John. That was a great article! I would think it would clear up any questions on nofollow links and outflow of juice.

And randfish is certainly right...it's going to take a lot of time and a lot of redesign to fix.

[Webnauts]

Thanks, John. That was a great article! I would think it would clear up any questions on nofollow links and outflow of juice.

And randfish is certainly right...it's going to take a lot of time and a lot of redesign to fix.

I just finished reading the comments of Rands post and before I did the same with the comments on Matt Cutts blog.

I see a lot of contradictions and or non-transparent statements for all parties. I think I should start from MC blog post comments.

Matt Cutts June 15, 2009 at 10:55 pm:

"...btmorex, I just think there’s usually better ways to spend your time as an SEO. If you have a pretty good site architecture to start with, you normally don’t need to think much about PageRank sculpting (e.g. wordpress does quite well at the mechanics of SEO by default)."
Source: PageRank sculpting

OK. So Matt Cutts tells that PageRank Sculpting works. Am I right?

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Matt Cutts June 15, 2009 at 10:55 pm:
"Amit Agarwal, great question. Given the way that Google works since this change, I would let PageRank flow even to your privacy and terms-of-service type pages. Even those sorts of pages can be useful for more searches than you would expect."

So MC confirms that it is not a good idea to block privacy and terms-of-service type pages. OK. I never blocked them. That's fine too.

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Andy Beard June 15, 2009 at 10:15 pm
"I take it using noindex, nofollow on your date based archives isn’t deliberate then?
Yes that is nasty, possibly enough to knock you a few rankings for Matt"
Source: PageRank sculpting

Matt Cutts June 15, 2009 at 10:55 pm:
"Andy Beard, I was only talking about the nofollow attribute on individual links, not noindex/nofollow as a meta tag. But I’ll check that out. Some parts of Thesis I really like, and then there’s a few pieces that don’t quite give me the granularity I’d like."
Source: PageRank sculpting

For my understanding, MC means that PageRank Sculpting works with meta robots noindex/nofollow.

But, sorry MC... How the hell can you Sculpt PageRank with a meta robots tag directive "nofollow". If I got that right, that is fully incorrect and misleading!!! About the noindex one, I am fine with that. But that cannot achive 100% PR flow, as the noindex page acrue PR, even if it is minimal. That said, that is about bots herding. Or is it still pageRank Sculpting? I need to re-think after I get some sleep. Or do you know already?

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Danny Sullivan June 15, 2009 at 11:44 pm
"Matt, as you know, I was kind of annoyed when you suggested sculpting to a room full of SEOs back in 2007. We’d been told over the years to do things for humans, not to overly worry about having to do stuff for search engines -- and suddenly, here you were suggesting that SEOs could flow PageRank to their most “important” pages. I’d figured Google had long since been smart enough to decide for itself what percentage of a page’s PageRank spend to assign to a particular link. That assumption didn’t just come out of the blue -- it came from things Google had hinted at over the years. So being told to start overtly flowing around the PageRank? It seemed counter-productive."
Source: PageRank sculpting

No further comments. Great post Danny.

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Matt Cutts June 16, 2009 at 12:30 am
"Sean Weigold Ferguson and David Airey, there are times when nofollow is useful. Paid links remains one of those reasons. When someone you don’t necessarily trust adds a link to your site is another good reason. It turns out that links with nofollow prevent quite a few blog spam sites from getting links, for example."
Source: PageRank sculpting

For that you have my bless Matt. Even if I still prefer this option: http://www.webproworld.com/search-en...tml#post440204

[Doc]

What a load of doublespeak! First, they tell us to do something and then a couple of years later, tell us we were wrong to be doing that.

Now, after what I THOUGHT was a fleeting moment of clarity, I'm even more confused about what they're saying, than before.

Whereas, if I fall back to the position of building for the quality of user experience, and cooperate in the conversion effort, blithely saying the HELL with Google, everything just might work out fine!

I think I like that option the best. At least then, if it doesn't gel, it's on ME!

[SteveGerencser]

Listening to Matt is like listening to a politician.. They say an awful lot of words that never seem to add up to anything much..

PR sculpting does work.. But for 99.5% of websites out there it is a waste of time and effort.. If you are in an extremely competitive market, with evenly matched quality competition, PR sculpting "might" be that one thing that gives you an edge if done properly.. But I view it as a 4th or 5th tier tactic that simply doesn't give you the results people think it will in most circumstances..

[Webnauts]

Listening to Matt is like listening to a politician.. They say an awful lot of words that never seem to add up to anything much..

Exactly Steve. But that is why people follow such guys.

PR sculpting does work.. But for 99.5% of websites out there it is a waste of time and effort.. If you are in an extremely competitive market, with evenly matched quality competition, PR sculpting "might" be that one thing that gives you an edge if done properly.. But I view it as a 4th or 5th tier tactic that simply doesn't give you the results people think it will in most circumstances..

Before I would go any further into this, I have one question? What do you mean it is a waste of time and effort? I recently had to implement some bots herding techniques (maybe other would call PR sculpting) for a web site of about 72.000 pages. I started my crawler and let it run in the background, and when the pages were indexed, I only needed to export the results in excel and create a robots.txt which took me 10-15 minutes.

My work all together was maybe 20 minutes. For sure if I would go into extreme refinements, that would need sort of time, which depends exclusively on the quality or state of the site navigation.

So what do you think?

[SteveGerencser]

I think that most people can't do it right in 20 minutes.. For that matter, most people can't do it right in 20 years..

The issue is that if you spend an hour trying to manipulate PR in this manner you are most likely find better benefits spending that hour doing almost anything else.. Getting one decent link, writing one page of decent content, altering on page text, anything.. But in a highly competitive market, where sites are nearly evenly matched, that little bit of boost you might get from trying to manipulate your PR might be that last piece of the puzzle that puts you ahead of them..

That's why I call it a 4th or 5th tier tactic.. There are plenty of things you could do that will give you more positive results quicker than manipulating PR..