NoFollow and PageRank Sculpting is it Worth the Effort
Posted on October 22nd, 2008by Michael Gray in SEO
A few weeks ago during SMX East, one of the subjects that came up was pagerank sculpting and use of nofollow. Most of the panelists didn’t use the practice, and Googler Matt Cutts has said it’s ok but not something he would put a high priority on if you set up your site correctly. Xoogler Vanessa Fox has similar sentiments. So if there’s so many high profile authority figures downplaying it, why are we still having this discussion? The problem is it’s a matter of scale and where you fall on the food chain, on whether or not it’s worth your time. Allow me to make an analogy …
Imagine for a moment that you are the owner of a 1972 Ford AMC Gremlin (nit pickers 
)
photo credit: zappowbang
Is putting a set of four high speed performance racing tires really going to make a difference? In fact considering they are probably going to cost as much as the car is worth probably not. You would be pretty safe saying it’s not worth the time energy and effort.
Now let’s assume that instead of the Ford gremlin you have a Ferrari Enzo …
Is putting a set of high perfermance racing tires on this car going to make a difference … abso-freekin-lutely ! In fact driving a car like this without a set of performance tires would be complete waste.
The tires on your car are the touch points between your car and the road. The links on your website are touch points between your website and Google’s crawling and indexing spiders. Much like cars not all websites are the same, not all websites have the “horsepower” to take advantage of tactics like nofollow and pagerank sculpting. The key is figuring out if you are closer to the Ford Gremlin or the Ferarri Enzo and adjusting your strategy accordingly.
For some websites using nofollow and pagerank sculpting is a complete waste of time, energy and resources. For other websites there may be some moderate level of benefit, and for some websites ignoring pagerank sculpting may be costing you traffic and sales.
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October 22nd, 2008 at 5:14 am
Nice analogy.
October 22nd, 2008 at 5:54 am
Nice Ferrari
October 22nd, 2008 at 6:27 am
I think this is a good point, but then again I often go at websites with the view to doing 100 things that have 1% effect than leaning on a few. I don’t like the idea of placing too much weight on any one item that could be algorithmically affected.
The other thing is whether or not the site is set-up using templates (etc), so changing obvious (privacy policy, etc) links might only take a few minutes…
Ben M
October 22nd, 2008 at 7:21 am
Nofollowing terms/disclaimer/about etc doesn’t quite much work at all.
October 22nd, 2008 at 7:33 am
I’ve implemented some nofollow and page sculpting techniques on one site, going further than the “about us” nofollowing and the results are really good. However, I don’t trust on a massive implementation.
October 22nd, 2008 at 7:58 am
Ouch… I always knew my sites weren’t full of horsepower, but this analogy took the Ferrari shrink wrap off my site and I now see that I have a moped.
October 22nd, 2008 at 8:31 am
I like the analogy. I’ve always said it’s worth spending a few minutes on it for EVERY site, but the returns diminish very quickly.
For example, you should be (in most cases) nofollowing your privacy policy, contact page, log-in/register pages, etc. Just doing that will see a nice return. Going beyond that, your analogy really comes into play — it’s not worth spending more time sculpting unless you’ve got a Ferrari.
Here is a simple chart I made showing time-vs-benefit of PR sculpting:
http://www.mickmelseo.com/20080314/should-you-sculpt-pagerank-using-nofollow/
October 22nd, 2008 at 9:08 am
Yeah I don’t really understand why I keep hearing PR Sculpting is not worth all the “time and effort”. If you implement nofollow tags from the beginning it’s very easy. Even if you are implementing this strategy on an existing site it’s pretty simple and not time consuming at all to propagate nofollow tags site wide.
2nd and more importantly isn’t this what SEO is? We all know there isn’t a “silver bullet” that will get you a number #1 ranking on the SERP’s tomorrow. It’s doing a combination of things just a little bit better than your competition in order to rank higher. This is just the nature of SEO, we were doing techniques 5 year ago that aren’t relevant today. And sure PR Sculpting may be useless 2 year or even 6 months from now. But as an SEO you have to adapt. That is why people hire us to optimize and promote their websites. In this ever changing landscape technique’s change on a monthly basis. Staying up to date is what separates the good SEO’s from the not so good SEO’s. If it was easy there wouldn’t be a need to hire a company to do your SEO or have an In-House SEO.
My 2 Cents…
October 22nd, 2008 at 9:16 am
I just blogged about this last week, and I completely agree. A brochure/sales site for a local restaurant with 5 pages isn’t going to need pagerank sculpting; but an online service directory with 50,000 pages can probably benefit from it.
FYI - The Gremlin was made by AMC, not Ford. Why do I know? My first car was a 1979 AMC Spirit, the “Ferrari” of the AMC line. I am as equally embarassed by my ownership of it as I am by disclosing that fact
October 22nd, 2008 at 9:29 am
Michael,
Out of interest, what sort of factors play into your decision of whether you’re closer to the Ford versus Ferrari?
Al.
October 22nd, 2008 at 9:35 am
I have always thought that some folks take PR sculpting way to seriously. Although, I kinda wonder if we as consultants should be thinking about these issues for smaller sites we work with, to prepare them for high volume, or do we just revisit them in a year and make changes then?
October 22nd, 2008 at 9:40 am
Al,
For me, the Ford vs. Ferrari depends on what else I have left to do. If I still need to clean up the look of the site, organize categories, add content, etc, then I’m not going to waste my time on this.
Conversely, if I have a smooth-running, content-loaded, well-optimized site, then I’m more apt to spend a bit of time sculpting.
–
Joe,
I believe everyone (small sites included) should at least do some basic sculpting from day one. Save the advanced stuff for down the road once they get some traffic.
October 22nd, 2008 at 9:52 am
I’m showing my age here . .
AMC, American Motors Corp, made the Gremlin and the equally fabulous AMC Pacer.
http://images.google.com/images?gbv=2&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&q=AMC+Pacer&btnG=Search+Images
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=AMC+Gremlin&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2
Automotive history is far more important than SEO, which is why I have labored to correct this serious error. :p
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:29 am
I am indifferent on the topic - if you have the time, why not do it? But, I would rather spend my time building more content, inbound links and improving the site as a whole.
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:32 am
I don’t think the tire analogy fits. To me a better way to put it is that the links are the roads and highways that search engines use to navigate throughout a web site. Some roads are more important than others, and in fact some may be considered dead-end or a waste of time. Pagerank sculpting is nothing more than someone giving precise instructions on the best way a search engine should navigate throughout a site.
Wasting time implementing a nofollow strategy doesn’t make sense either. In comparison, of all the SEO related strategies that exists, PR sculpting takes very little time and effort.
October 22nd, 2008 at 11:21 am
Ford Gremlin? AMC made the Gremlin
October 22nd, 2008 at 11:51 am
I made a site, got page rank 4/10 and nothing changed. So I’m going to cry foul on this post.
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Your homepage PR isn’t the point of this technique — it’s about best leveraging it as it flows through your site.
October 22nd, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Well Michael, the analogy is good…sort of, IMO. If you have a great car (site) and you put on great tires (sculpting), what makes people think that just because that car is starting to run better that it was the tires and only the tires that did it? That’s when the analogy breaks down I believe. A car thing might be easier to look at, etc, but a website with it’s many parts? … not so much.
I know of sites out there, and have read about sites in blogs, etc who claim that sculpting like this helped them. How do they absolutely know this with no doubt? They couldn’t.
I don’t see the benefit and am in the circle of those who just don’t think it’s worth it.
October 23rd, 2008 at 7:27 am
Looks like you’ve stirred up a debate there Michael - always good!
(although, just in case in case anyone was wondering, I’m the one that’s right!!! hehe!)
October 23rd, 2008 at 8:00 am
Not sure i quite agree with the anology, putting on great tyres on an AMC would still make it corner better just as PR sculpting is just good practice for smaller sites - but I take your point that the time/resources/money could be better spent elsewhere!
October 23rd, 2008 at 8:18 am
Ha! I had the hardest time explaining why we needed to get started on this daunting project (thousands of pages need sculpting) when your car analogy would have done the trick in about 4 minutes! Thanks
October 23rd, 2008 at 8:02 pm
I really like your analogy. And I totally agree with you on this. I think no follow and pageRank sculpting is worth the effort if you have a site that has a relatively high Trust Rank and PR. So implementing some of those techniques can actually help you to spread the trust and the juice to your ‘more important pages’ rather than wasting it in the less important ones.
October 24th, 2008 at 2:40 am
I like the analogy!!
October 24th, 2008 at 3:36 am
[...] Gray explains why PageRank sculpting is important. He explains that Google has downplayed the use of PR sculpting but it seems that it’s [...]
October 24th, 2008 at 4:04 am
I really like your analogy… makes sense!
October 24th, 2008 at 10:31 am
I imagine that with a massive website it would be well worth the time. However the greatest benefit I have noticed is that the important pages are indexed and revisited that much quicker/more regularly.
So I’ll continue to nofollow the lesser pages for now.
October 24th, 2008 at 11:19 am
I think part of the problem is that it a measurement tool by Google which automatically draws people to it making them beleive that unless they have a high rank they still have much SEO work to do. At the very least its a nice little confidence booster when you see that number climb.
October 25th, 2008 at 6:43 am
We dont bother with the no-follow as by implementing it, it says that this website has been “optimised”. Has anyone actually seen a different in their sites by putting a No-Follow, that is sites that are not blogs. For Blogs I guess I understand because people are posting and their are so many outgoing links which should rather be used to increase the importance of internal links. Please help.
October 26th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Micheal, nice analogies. Personally for the life of me I don’t get the value in PR sculpting. Nofollow is supposed to mean “not trusted” so either Google has used the HTML attribute incorrectly or at some point they could take this literally and then you are basically saying you don’t trust your own content. A bad thing when you think about it. Google once said they’d never allow things out of our control to influence rankings. Then we get negative SEO as part of the link clampdown. Basically IMO, PR sculpting may not be a problem now but… as we’ve seen before things can change radically with no heads up. I also don’t get it because a few IBLs to the pages you are trying to help IMO, supplies the same pop and is likely less time consuming.
October 28th, 2008 at 7:43 am
Ok, what’s next? Hide all external links from the search engine spiders?
October 28th, 2008 at 9:48 am
@alp: no you dont have to hide them just nofollow them and create an SEO Black Hole like Wikipedia
October 29th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
We do not use the no-follow either, my main competition, (A Mate of mine) always use this method, however it is really hard to tell if it does work or not, as it could be a range of other factors that effect the sites SEO efforts.
As Terry stated, Google seems to change without warning and they will continue to do this to keep their market share and product still at number one, Thats why Im glad I found your site Michael, excellent work Mate
October 30th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
I appreciate the analogy and understand it, but you really should go the next step and actually give people an idea of what kind of websites would actually benefit from page rank sculpting.
October 31st, 2008 at 9:01 pm
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November 5th, 2008 at 2:08 am
Hi Michael,
Nice post. As you are an seo expert, can i ask you that do nofollow links really ant efect on google ranking rather than getting traffics?