Beware SEOs Who Tell You PageRank Sculpting Works
You may not be aware of the many differences of opinion that divide the professional search engine optimization community over the best practices they should be following. Despite 15 years’ effort to develop and refine reliable methods for building and enhancing search engine visibility, most people in the SEO community still cannot agree on even the most fundamental principles. In fact, the vast majority of SEOs offering their skills for hire have less than 3 years’ experience. They lack the insight and background necessary to detect and reject the bad ideas that are put forth by less capable SEO “thought leaders”.
The lack of discerning judgement by some SEOs has led to the growth in a controversial practice called PageRank Sculpting. Originally proposed in 2007, PageRank Sculpting was always challenged by the most respected minds in the SEO industry on the basis of basic flaws in its premise. And yet despite admissions from Google in the summer of 2009 that it had put in place safeguards to prevent PageRank Sculpting from harming Websites, some people in the SEO industry continue to promote and use PageRank Sculpting.
What’s more disturbing is that these PageRank Sculpting adherents have unleashed a new generation of techniques that Google and other search engines may not be able to protect your site against. The first form of PageRank Sculpting relied upon the use of “rel=’nofollow’”, a link attribute, on Website navigation links. This effectively hides links from most major search engines. Unfortunately, PageRank Sculpting caused many sites to lose search visibility and rankings. If not for Google’s quick intervention, because the SEO community failed to realize the harm it was doing, many well-established Websites might today be hardly visible in search results at all.
The new form of PageRank Sculpting calls for hiding navigation links from the search engines through other means. With no clear footprint to detect, this insidious form of PageRank Sculpting may slip past search engine protections and do irreparable harm to large commercial Websites. Many smaller sites, especially bloggers, have already found to their dismay that attempting to sculpt PageRank has virtually removed their sites from Google’s index.
Good search engine optimization calls for building strong, well-interlinked navigational structures for Websites. One of the original reasons cited for the use of PageRank Sculpting — that the “wrong” pages were being shown in search results — is a sign of poor site navigation. You cannot fix bad navigation by hiding part of your navigation from search engines. The people who preach PageRank Sculpting simply do not understand how PageRank works and you should avoid doing business with them.