Beyond PageRank sculpting

As Danny Sullivan reported, earlier today at SMX Advanced Matt Cutts dropped a couple of  bombs on the audience. I’ll focus on this one: selectively adding the “rel=nofollow” attribute to a page’s outgoing links (a technique known as PageRank sculpting) is not going to benefit that page’s remaining links as it used to, since Google will not let all the PageRank flow through them, contrary to what Matt himself had suggested in the past, and to what has been long claimed and recognized by some of the best-known SEO consultants –which are now understandably baffled and confused.

I’m pretty sure Matt Cutts will post soon to clarify what that has been causing quite a stir in the SEOsphere since it was first tweeted. I’m also looking forward to reading Michael Gray’s updates and thoughts on this specific subject. As Danny put it,

You can expect Matt will do a blog post to cover this topic more. You can expect lots of people to be analyzing the change, and what it might or might not mean.

Meanwhile, I’d like to share a couple of thoughts.

First of all, the smartest SEOs around have always been quite skeptical about the effectiveness of using the nofollow attribute to manipulate the internal distribution of PageRank, and the overall sustainability of PR sculpting as an optimization technique. Let me quote just two.

Back in March, 2008, Shari Thurow wrote an excellent article (as Danny Sullivan reminds) about nofollow, which sounds ironically premonitory now:

I predict that the nofollow attribute will be abused and the attribute will shortly be devalued. I’m not going to use it to sculpt PageRank. I have never had to because, unlike most SEOs, I try to build sites that have a good information architecture, site navigation, and cross-linking structure from the onset.

On this side of the Atlantic, SEO guru Enrico Altavilla (a.k.a. LowLevel) already knew it all: in fact, exactly three years ago he noted that, since according to its original stochastic definition as a probability distribution on web pages, a page’s PageRank represents the probability that a “random surfer” visits that page by link-following, it would make very little sense to think that Google would not let any amount of PageRank flow through completely ignore the existence of^[1] a visibile, clickable link just because its author deliberately chose to devalue it through nofollow.

Finally, and most importantly, if you have been relying heavily on PageRank sculpting, my advice is to reconsider your strategy and focus your future on-site efforts on what you (hopefully) have full control over: content, site architecture, and link structure. Use nofollow sparingly if you don’t want your PR to evaporate (that’s Matt Cutts, as quoted by Richard Baxter), but also think carefully about what pages to link to from high-PR, high-traffic pages, and how to shape your site’s contents: good design and usability analysis are bulletproof “techniques” guaranteed not to fade away after the next SMX conference. 

Note

Edited in order to reflect more precisely (IMHO) what Enrico wrote in the post I quoted: he actually did not imply that a certain amount of PR could flow even through a nofollowed link (however plausible that assumption may be), but just that the remaining links might not have their random surfer probability score inflated because of the nofollowed link(s) –which is exactly the point in PR sculpting. Sorry for overinterpreting.