PageRank Sculpting is dead. Matt Cutts announcement about how google handles no-follow links was a big news for “advanced seo” users. It caused quite big buzz in blogosphere, especially because of the way it was announced. A post in official google blog would be taken much calmer than indirect announcement during SMX.
PageRank sculpting is a technique that allows webmasters to “save” “link juice” of site and direct it to specific pages in the website instead of passing it to low value pages (about, privacy policy and similar) or off-site links (links in comments). This was done mostly using nofollow link attribution, as it allowed marking untrusted links. The change does not disables no-follow completely, however no-follow attribute does not saves page rank anymore, it vanishes without attribution.
Another announcement made is about Google able to crawl javascript and counting javascript links in. This is a welcome and long awaited change, which impacts sculpting as well.
In my opinion, using no-follow for page rank sculpting is bad for overall SEO community. No-follow attribute is not so different from link cloaking, that is showing different content for search engines and users. Each link on website should be counted in, though the weight would depend on the context of the link. If search engines cannot assign proper weights to each link, it is their problem, which should not be solved by implementing special markup unseen for regular user. Same is true for javascript links and ajax usage – they are not different from regular links in most of cases.
Same applies for no-follow usage in comments. Comment spam is largely solved issue for newer websites. We have anti-spam services, comment moderation, captcha, bot-checking plugins. This is enough. Google and other search engines can distinguish and calculate comment link weight pretty well. So no-follow attribute in comments is unnecessary probably.
Thus, is this an end of page rank sculpting? No, not at all. We had returned to (almost) same point where we were before no-follow. Proper site architecture, good content layout will work in the future. Remember, that you create site for the users and not search engines.
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