Website | Goolgle | SEO | PageRank | Matt Cutts

Posted • September 20, 2008 • 1 Comment

Sculpt your google PageRank with the “nofollow” tag

Google PageRank sculpting has began gaining a lot of momentum lately. It is also the topic of many debates, The question is whether it really works or is just a time consuming futile attempt to control the search engine’s valuation of your website’s internal page values. To understand you will have to have a handle on google PageRank

PageRank

PageRank was developed by Larry Page, google founder, and is one of the multitude of factors that determine your sites position in the google SERPs (search engine results pages). Google assigns a numeric value of 0 to 10 (10 being considered the most authoritative) to each page on the web, this value is used to help in determining the amount of link juice each page will pass on through it’s out going links.

PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

Mathematical PageRanks (out of 100) for a simple network (PageRanks reported by Google are rescaled logarithmically). Page C has a higher PageRank than Page E, even though it has fewer links to it: the link it has is much higher valued. A web surfer who chooses a random link on every page (but with 15% likelihood jumps to a random page on the whole web) is going to be on Page E for 8.1% of the time. (The 15% likelihood of jumping to an arbitrary page corresponds to a damping factor of 85%.) Without damping, all web surfers would eventually end up on Pages A, B, or C, and all other pages would have PageRank zero. Page A is assumed to link to all pages in the web, because it has no outgoing links.

PageRank Sculpting – Siloing

PageRank sculpting is act of using “nofollow” tags on internal site links to focus page or link value to the pages and anchor text that the site owner wants in a search engine. PageRank sculpting is accomplished by done by adding the rel=”nofollow” attribute value to a (a href)(/a) link tag. Other tools that can be added to your PR sculpting arsenal are the robots.txt file, META noindex tags and even javascript. The concept for the specification of the attribute value “nofollow” tag was designed by Google’s head of webspam team Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen from Blogger.com in 2005.

Matt Cutts in response to a Rand Fishkin question:

The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links…

The “nofollow” tag is currently recognized by all three major search engines, google, Yahoo, and Live (MSN). Just because you are using the “nofollow” tags on your links you shouldn’t assume that the search engines won’t follow the links or even index the pages at the end of the links. The “nofollow” tag is not intended for blocking access to content or preventing content to be indexed by search engines. It is used to curtail the passing of link juice or page value from one page to another. Regardless you should always have both HTML and XML sitemaps to make it easy for the search engines to find your pages. It is best to make sure that you have a “nofollow” tag on all links pointing to your HTML sitemap.

5 PageRank Sculpting Tips

Michael Gray at SMX Advanced 2008:

Make Good Use of Your Time – PageRank sculpting, if done correctly, takes time and planning. Make sure to have a game plan.
Sculpt from the Beginning – Sculpting should take place while a site is being built it is easier, and has a more immediate impact. The earlier you sculpt, the better.
Pay Attention to Detail – Sculpting isn’t something you can do casually. You need to have complete and undivided attention to do it properly.
Use More than 1 Tool to Sculpt – Don’t rely on just the “nofollow” tags use the robots.txt file, META noindex tags and javascript to shape your sculpting efforts.
Sculpt the Entire Site – PageRank comes in from manhy sources and directions. Don’t assume that sculpting the flow from your homepage is all you need to do.

Even with all the stuff mentioned above Google PageRank sculpting still remains an art. As an art the beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there are no set rules as to what should be nofollowed and what should not it is done on a case by case instance. The sitemap.html and user login pages would be a good place to start though.

The following are NOT reasons to use PageRank Sculpting.

A way to cut corners in your SEO – You will still need a well thought out SEO strategy. PageRank sculpting should be considered from the beginning.
A replacement for bad internal linking structure – PageRank sculpting is not a Band-Aid for a poorly designed linking structure
A link building substitute – It is the incoming links that you are sculpting for, not the other way around.

Late,
Gary Pool

Copy and paste this code into your website to create a link to this page.

Don't keep it to your self share this post with others

Category: Code, Meta Tags, Search Engines
Tags: Google > SEO > Sitemap

Comments

One Response to “Website | Goolgle | SEO | PageRank | Matt Cutts”

Whos Got Tip #11? User Generate This SEO and Marketing List : PluginZilla
December 28th, 2008 @ 1:34 pm

[...] BLOG ? 12 Wordpress SEO Plugins to Optimize Your Business Blog SEO Basics Part 5: No Follow Tags Website | Goolgle | SEO | PageRank | Matt Cutts Nofollow 101 – Understanding the Nofollow [...]