Pagerank Sculpting And How The Nofollow Attribute Can Be Manipulated For Better Link Juice Distribution
Monday, September 28, 2009 1:30
So today i write about the benefits of Pagerank sculpting which was born with the introduction of the ‘nofollow’ attribute of the <a> tag.
Pagerank sculpting can be defined as the art of manipulating the flow of link juice to outbound or internal links placed on a particular page by either limiting the amount of links or setting the links to be not followed(to flow no link juice) by making use of the ‘nofollow’ attribute.
Whenever something new is introduced in the digital world, it has its own Pros and Cons and people get to the task of manipulating or exploiting the Cons while equally making use of its Pros. The introduction of the ‘nofollow’ attribute, which on being assigned to a link gave it no priority or made it ‘invisible’ to major search engine bots was a revolution in the SEO industry. It influenced the introduction of many Algorithmic changes in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Msn, etc. The way PR flowed to links from pages was redefined and brought about many many changes in the way Search results were displayed.’Spam’ was the target and the engineers at the major search engine cos got their predictions right. Spam drastically decreased after March 2004, at which time it had reached its peak.
Getting back to the topic, as you know ‘link juice’ or ‘PageRank juice’ is uniformly distributed to all the links placed on a certain page (Refer the following article for more info : Google’s PageRank Algorithm and how it can be used in SEO). Thus having just one link(total) on a PR2 page is seen to be much more useful than having your 1 link and 100 other links on a PR7 page. You cannot control the number of links on pages of third party sites but you surely can control how many links you have on your own page. Let us take into example page ‘x’ which is one of the pages in your say ‘1000+’pages website. Say ‘x’ has a Pagerank of ‘5′. Now you would like to make maximum use of the PR5 by controlling the flow of link juice on it. Say you have 50 links(outbound+internal) on it, so the link juice of ‘x’ is evenly distributed to all links placed on that page. i.e. each link gets a Pagerank boost of 0.15+[0.85*(5/50)] = 0.235. Now out of the 50, you place the ‘nofollow’ attribute to 45 of them and leave the remaining 5 as they were. So when a Search engine crawler goes through this page, it ignores those 45 links and flows the link juice(PR juice) of ‘x’ among the remaining 5 links. So now, these 5 links each get a Pagerank boost of 0.15+[0.85*(5/5)] = 1. Considering ‘1 > 0.23‘, you have just manipulated the flow of link juice on Page ‘x’ to benefit those 5 links, which may be either your own internal links or some outbound links.
This is a completely ethical method and is used by many professional SEOs. Even on normal situations the nofollow attribute can be effectively applied to links like ‘login’, ‘register’, ‘lost password’, ‘tags’, ‘comments’, etc. which would do no harm but would simultaneously do some SEO in itself. For those who don’t know how to apply the nofollow attribute to a link, here is how it is done <a href=’http://techfrog.org’ rel=’nofollow’>Techfrog</a>. Hope this information helps, any feedback and suggestions are welcomed. 
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