Page Rank Sculpting

[cbielich]

Just a thought.

With the way pagerank works and passing link juice evenly across all your links. Would it make sense to structure your site so that each page passes your all your link juice from lets say your homepage to another page. Then that page would contain all the link juice from the homepage. Then do the same thing with the next pages. For instance

Homepage - linkjuice 10

• link1 - follow
• link2 rel=nofollow
• link3 rel=nofollow
• link4 rel=nofollow
• link5 rel=nofollow

Link1 - linkjuice 10

• link1 rel=nofollow
• link2 - follow
• link3 rel=nofollow
• link4 rel=nofollow
• link5 rel=nofollow

Link2 - linkjuice 10

• link1 rel=nofollow
• link2 rel-nofollow
• link3 - follow
• link4 rel=nofollow
• link5 rel=nofollow

Link3 - linkjuice 10

• link1 rel=nofollow
• link2 rel-nofollow
• link3 rel=nofollow
• link4 - follow
• link5 rel=nofollow

Link4 - linkjuice 10

• link1 rel=nofollow
• link2 rel-nofollow
• link3 rel=nofollow
• link4 rel=nofollow
• link5 - follow

and so on.

Theoretically would'nt this help pass a ton if not all of link juice to your main links? Sorry if this is a dumb question, it's late and sometimes my mind goes places

[matbennett]

Not a dumb question at all. There was a "fashion" for this for a while. Unfortunately it was really obvious manipulation, so things were changed to make it ineffective.  Now the pagerank that would have passed down those no-follow links just dissipates.

That means that "sculpting" is now more about removing unwanted links and ensuring good structure.

[DougRoberts]

As Mat says, the nofollow links are still allocated a share of the "link juice" and then it's just discarded. So in your example above you'd be throwing away 8 points and passing only 2 down to your first link!

So, if you want to pass more link equity to the pages you really want to rank you may want to remove some links that don't really matter. (For example combining your privacy policy / terms and conditions / legal pages into one...)

[EGOL]

This is an example of how google will change their mind without tellin'

When nofollow first came out Matt Cutts said that it could be used to "sculpt" pagerank.  Some people started to use it that way.  Then,  years later, Google said that they had changed their mind about this quite a while ago and that they had been evaporating the pagerank flowing into nofollow links.

So, just because you hear google say something today.  Don't count on that working tomorrow.

Bottom line, do stuff because you think it will be GOOD FOR THE VISITORS ON YOUR WEBSITE.

Lots of the links that people have built in the past have negative value today.... lots of the crap content that people created in the past has negative value today...     Those folks should have been building things that are good for their visitors instead of building contraptions to fool google.   You might fool google today but down the road it will hit you in the ass.