Pagerank sculpting case...

[gerardoH]

We have a website which has:

a) a top navigation with links to top categories

b) a footer with links to top categories and to every subcategory

c) the following structure: home > category > subcategory > items

For usability purposes I plan to remove the links at the bottom and add a drop down menu to each top category in top navigation.

I plan to make all links in the top nav no follow in order to be able to do pagerank sculpting for each category (will build links that point to each category and pass link juice to subcategories and then to items, but I don't want link juice to spread across all of the site through links in the footer, which as said before will be removed)

Is pagerank sculpting still valid? What do you think of my plan?

Thanks for your time.

[john4math]

You used to be able to do this, but PageRank sculpting is no longer valid.  I wouldn't nofollow any internal links.  Nofollowing links burns the PageRank rather than sculpting it.  Here's an example:

Page A links to Page B, C and D.  Page A has 6 link juice "votes" to cast to these pages it links to.  Page A passes 2 votes to each page, B, C and D.

You nofollow the link to page D. Now page A passes 2 votes to page B and C, and no votes to page D.  2 votes are lost by the nofollow.  It doesn't pass 3 votes each to pages B and C.

[gerardoH]

Thank you very much for your concise and excellent explanation.

Needless to say, other opinions are welcome.

[DougRoberts]

But you can ask yourself if the link needs to be there at all... (Does every page need to link to your privacy policy, terms and conditions etc...)