PageRank Sculpting - Rand Says Sculpt Away Baby

• nofollow no longer useful for PageRank sculpting with Google
• #1 - Google is now "evaporating" link juice through nofollowed links

• #2 - Selecting which links receive juice on a page is still critically important
  
• #3 - Doing good things for SEO shouldn't get in the way of a good user experience
  
• New method is "Link Consolidation". Merging content from low value pages into 1 page, and using anchors.

• Debate with Michael Martinez in blog comments. He believes page rank sculpting is bogus and not supported by evidence.

Article Source: PageRank Sculpting with Link Consolidation

My site is set out with PHP like:

Site stuff

domain.com/index.php?act=blabla

Cheats

domain.com/cheats.php?game=blabla

Reviews

domain.com/reviews.php?game=blabla

Does that mean im already setup for that?

btw im buying vbseo in the summer, yay!

It's not the same thing as being discussed in this article, but those formats can be handled with vBSEO's Custom Rewrite Rules.

Yes, as Joe stated, you could get your URLs from:

domain.com/cheats.php?game=grand-theft-auto

to:

domain.com/cheats/grand-theft-auto

Thanks for the update on this!

Now I'll have to think about making a single "About us" page or something similar to that and putting all those links on just that one page, like the Privacy statement link, which is currently on the bottom of every single page.

So a quick question: Should I put an "About Us" link in my footer and then remove from the footer the "Privacy Policy" link and the "Contact Us" link and stick those under the "About Us" page? Would that be consolidating in the correct manor as far as what Google is looking for?

...just want to make sure I got this right

Thanks!

I don't completely understand the link juice evaporation part, but the consolidation is kind of odd. Anchors used to be very popular in the past, and it seems we are coming full circle again.

So as I understand it, You can still leave all of your links to "about, legal, etc" in place, but instead of pointing to about.html and legal.html, you would point to some generic page that contains all of that information consolidated onto that one page (misc.php or something that makes sense -- though admittedly, I can't come up with a good name).

The difference would then be in the actual links. The link to About Us would point to domain.com/misc.html#AboutUs and legal to domain.com/misc.html#Legal and so on and so forth.

Interesting concept.

I won't be changing anything just yet though as I'd like to see how this pans out first.

Originally Posted by JPetrillo

Thanks for the update on this!

Now I'll have to think about making a single "About us" page or something similar to that and putting all those links on just that one page, like the Privacy statement link, which is currently on the bottom of every single page.

So a quick question: Should I put an "About Us" link in my footer and then remove from the footer the "Privacy Policy" link and the "Contact Us" link and stick those under the "About Us" page? Would that be consolidating in the correct manor as far as what Google is looking for?

...just want to make sure I got this right

Thanks!

No you don't remove those links totally.
first you need to make a new page and use anchors to the different content on that page (about us, privacy, tos, etc. then in your footer you link to those anchors.

I personally think this is quite a lot of work, It is messy, and in a few months time we will probably find out it does not give that much benefit.

Originally Posted by hornstar6969

I personally think this is quite a lot of work, It is messy, and in a few months time we will probably find out it does not give that much benefit.

My thoughts exactly.

Originally Posted by hornstar6969

first you need to make a new page and use anchors to the different content on that page (about us, privacy, tos, etc. then in your footer you link to those anchors.

Oh, well then I don't have to change anything because that's how I already got it setup!

I was also under the impression that PageRank is just a lot of hype. Is that all changed?

Just do the opposite of what the Google boys always say and you'll be better off. Black Hatters have proven time and time again that Mat Cutts and gang are a sack full of hot air.

To my understanding of what Matt Cutts said, the described concept of consolidation won't work. The simple reason is: You're still having several separate links in the footer. They're all leading to the same page (just different anchors), but still every link counts as one link.

So if I'd experiment with this, I'd rather have this consolidated misc.html page and then have just ONE link in the footer like <a href="misc.html" rel="nofollow">Legal, Contact, blabla</a>.

Originally Posted by hornstar6969

I was also under the impression that PageRank is just a lot of hype. Is that all changed?

+1

I still think it's a good idea to rel nofollow the links that are not trusted and so I like to use the vbseo white list because it offers me a good way to choose what links are good and deserve 'juice'.

One very important thing is just assessing which links can stay and which links can go. You'll see in Critiques, we continually recommending getting rid of stuff like the FAQ links if not for everyone, then for guests using vB template conditionals.

This new method is a bit messy, although it would appear to have technical merit. But it certainly doesn't rival getting rid of unneeded links completely.