What Is PageRank Sculpting?

Call it whatever you like: PageRank Hording, PageRank Siloing, or it’s latest name, PageRank Sculpting. The truth of the matter is, it’s all the same thing. The idea behind it is that, instead of allowing all your site links and outbound links to be dofollow, you cut off the unnecessary ones by using a nofollow tag.

Matt Cutts, Rand Fishkin, and Bruce Clay have all had a say about the practice, and in general the SEO community had entered a into a hype over it. But it seems that the success has been as marginal as those three voices had explained while the community jumped the gun.

It’s understandable why people dove head first into it. The idea of saving your link juice from other sites or even your About Us page seems like it would make a big difference if you cut out enough fat. With little to none spilling over an Google not crawling those links or pages, there would be more juice where you need it. You could even redirect your links from a high PageRank page to another you want to boost up, nofollowing the rest, and the idea should really make a difference.

But unlike the difference you receive from incoming links, this method provides marginal results. On an established website, this can be a project that is worth the time it takes to do correctly. With people like Nathan Buggia from Microsoft and Matt Cutts from Google speaking up about it’s benefit, if you have the time to build a sculpting plan out, why not?

The practice is in no way penalized either. You could easily achieve the same effect by setting the page to not be crawled by the robots.txt file, or even setting the entire page to nofollow through the use of meta tag data.

It would be very interesting to get a survey going and see the results of how PageRank Sculpting helps a website. If you’re interested, please answer the following questions below in our comments section.

• Do you currently utilize this method?
• Have you seen an increase in rank or traffic due to using it?
• Has the rank or traffic advanced at a higher level than that of other pages on your website?
• Have any of the websites that use to be dofollow links from your blog removed your link or altered yours?

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