Understanding SEO With Aedig

The latest buzz (and flurry of questions) comes around the practice of PageRank sculpting. We’ve discussed this topic in some detail previously on SEOmoz (1, 2 and 3) and recently published a guide. However, with renewed interest comes a need for renewed focus.

Does PageRank Sculpting Work?

The simplest answer is yes. It definitely does work – the devil is in the details of how well and to what extent it brings value. However, anyone can set up a simple test to watch PageRank sculpting with nofollow in action. Just follow these simple steps:

Create a new page in a test environment (either on a new domain or in a new section of an existing site).

Point enough links to this new page to get it indexed in the three major search engines. There are a variety of methods to do this, but for testing sites, I like Jane’s clever tactic of leveraging the social media link sources to get the engines visiting regularly and keeping it in the index.

Create 10-20 links on the new page pointing to completely unique pages, targeting make-believe terms and phrases for which no search engine shows results (like yootermimitank).

Wait for the engines to visit and see these new pages. Chances are, they won’t index all of those new, nonsense word pages (particularly if you’ve pointed very small amounts of link juice to your test page). If they do index all of them, just keep adding links to new nonsense pages until they stop getting all of them.

Start nofollowing those links a few at a time, until all the pages that remain with links pointing to them are in the engines’ index. Remarkably, the engines all behave fairly similarly, and seem to have fairly similar thresholds for keeping a page in the index (though Yahoo! appeared to be the most lenient when I performed this test several months back).

You’ve now used nofollow to “sculpt” where PageRank/link juice is pointing and through it, influenced which pages the engines keep in their index vs. discard. You’re also directly observing the phenomenon of how a page splits its PageRank through the links it points to – fewer links means more juice per page, leading to a higher probability of being crawled and indexed.

(BTW – for another fun test, try this one I wrote about at Sphinn a while back)

Source: SEOmoz