Link Sculpting

Posted on June 8th, 2008 by Jeremy Turner

Hi. This is Jeremy Turner, and here’s some links to articles I’ve been reading while watching the game. Today’s topic du jour is “Link sculpting.” First I read about “PageRank sculpting” here, here, and here. Then I went back and read that first link. Link sculpting is an interesting concept of using the “nofollow” tag on in-site links on your website. If you don’t know much about the “nofollow” tag, these links are a good way to get you up to speed on their usage in modern websites and how they relate to SEO. I kinda sorta got it before, but now i “get it.” Seems obvious to me—especially reading what Matt Cutts has to say about it—that larger sites really trying to sculpt the search traffic to their sites should be implementing this practice. Ok, top of the ninth, tied game, time to start paying attention.

Tags: Jeremy Turner, link sculpting, matt cutts, nofollow, pagerank, SEO

Jeremy Turner
Thanks for the clarification Michael. Yeah, going back and re-reading this post is rather cringe worthy. Re-reading my post now is a bit cringe-inducing for me. I definitely should have spent some more time on this one, or at least explained who Matt Cutts even is. Just to clarify, nobody should ever take my advice on any of this stuff. I'm currently trying to figure out what I did wrong to have jeremyturner.net completely wiped out from the Google index, so please take any "advice" with extreme caution. I still think using "nofollow" is an interesting concept though, the example being an e-commerce site with multiple links to the same product throughout their site who wants to control what link shows up in Google search results. Making sure a single link garners all of the relevancy seems like a proper strategy. Is there a better way of achieving this goal?

Michael Martinez
Matt Cutts does NOT endorse the practice. Rand put those words into his mouth and he posted a comment on that post where he corrected Rand's misattribution:

"I think saying people 'should be' using nofollow is a bit strong. More like people can use it for internal links if they're power-user-y enough to want to sculpt PageRank flow within their site at the link level. But I'd say that most regular webmasters don't need to worry about link-level PageRank flow within their site. I think saying 'power users and webmasters should be employing on their sites' overstates it a little. It's available if you want to get into that much fine-grained control."
Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-wi...

In fact, several Googlers came out and advised people NOT to attempt to sculpt links after that post.

It's a bad idea and a complete waste of time because no one outside of Google has any way of measuring PageRank or seeing where it flows through a Web site.

Leo
That may be the case, but sites that use this practice actually create black hole sites...where nothing really leaves and they basically hoard all of their link juice. I imagine eventually the google team will figure out that "nofollow" is really just a bad idea. It does very little good for the community on the whole.

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