Pagerank sculpting best practices for e-commerce websites

[DancingWebmasters]

What is currently the best practice to not let pagerank flow to policy, contact and other less important pages on an e-commerce website? Pages have to be visible on the home page, (currently in the footer) so unfortunately they cannot be moved to a "single" url.

How likely is that a PR5 home page can sculpt PR4 first category pages if the # of outgoing links are at a reasonable number and structured well?

Currently the home page is PR5, but category pages are only PR3  - and not structured properly...

[firstconversion]

There is no advice, page rank sculpting died a while back.It was replaced by decent keyword research and strong IA

You can combine pages into a single page if you like. Links don't have to go to unique pages, they can go to anchors within a page

The way you are using PR, I don't think it means what you think it means. Forget about PR really

[DancingWebmasters]

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for your reply.  I understand your message, and I am not that concerned about PR. However when you compare search results  (urls that are ranking for certain keywords) PR is still a ranking factor. I know it is only one of the many, but it is still there. Now I can also see that sites with good internal linking structure have better "toolbar" PR breakdown, than sites without it (I am comparing sites with no external links to these deep links).

So if there is no pagerank sculpting, why do these pages have PR in the first place?

Also what is the current situation with "nofollow" links in terms of the above?

[KyleJB]

I'm confused about this as well. @Stephen, are you saying that at this point it isn't a best practice to nofollow, hide, or otherwise limit the number of internal links leaving an important page?

I'm in a similar position as Dancing Webmasters: one of the sites I manage has a lot of navigational footer links that are also shown in the header and side navigation bars. My first instinct was to simply remove most of them, knowing that the standard nofollow PR sculpting techniques have been dead for years. Are you saying that at this point it doesn't matter how many links are on any given page, in terms of page authority?

I already know that PR isn't a top factor anymore, but it was my understanding that the overall authority of a page would be diluted by having a large number of links on that page. That's not true?

Thanks

Kyle

[Cyrus-Shepard]

I have to agree with most of what Stephen is saying. The whole concept of PageRank sculpting can quickly can quickly fall into a murky debate filled with dangerous half-truths and misguiding answers.

The simple answer is to make sure your less important pages are less important in your navigation. Google will still assign a certain amount of PageRank to these links/pages, but other link signals such as placement, context and relevance will more than compensate.

The real question is - how do you get your category pages to rank higher? In the days of Penguin, higher PageRank via sculpting through site-wide navigation links probably isn't the way you want to go.

I'd try to bolster the category pages with natural, in-body links contained within great articles/content on my site. For example, whenever we talk about link building here at SEOmoz, we often reference the link building category. This category is not linked to in the universal navigation, except in the sidebar of the blog.

By using links like the one I just inserted, I can not only vary the anchor text, but I just added relevance and context to the link, giving a possible boost to the ranking signals.

Regardless, I hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Rand wrote an article about footer links some time ago that still stands up well today: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/footer-link-optimization-for-search-engines-user-experience

I'd say if you are duplicating links, it's a good time to re-examine your navigation.