The Art of PageRank Sculpting
http://developer.practicalecommerce.com/articles/3095-SEO-PageRank-Sculpting-for-2011
Understanding the concept of PageRank is vital for businesses who wish to promote their store online. How it works is that every page Google indexes is given a certain rank based on the amount of inbound links it has. If that page is linked to another page, it passes its PageRank in lesser equal parts to the page it is linked to. This applies to the material in class we learned regarding PageRank where there were hubs and authorities and if a hub was linked to an authority it gave it a vote. The total number of votes each authority received was indicative of its popularity vs. the rest of the authorities. Thus the number of inbound links to a certain page reflects its rank given by PageRank. Using this knowledge, it was theorized that you could design your website to control the flow of PageRank through some of the more important links as opposed to links irrelevant to your business. This concept was known as PageRank Sculpting. For example if you have a webpage that has 21 links on it, you could choose to “nofollow” some portion of the links that lead to less relevant content. An example would be like a link to your privacy faq or a link to creating an account. These links are necessary for the usability of the site but they are not going to rank in the search engine. Theoretically, nofollowing seven links would flow 21 links worth of PageRank through only 14 links and instead of a single drop of PageRank passed through the every link, or 1/21 of the available PageRank, you would theoretically get 1.5 drops of PageRank passed through the 14 remaining links. Thus, you would have more link juice flowing to pages that needed to rank better like best-seller products and less link juice towards less important pages like the to print link.
In 2009, PageRank sculpting was proven to be ineffective as announced by Matt Cutts, a head spam cop for Google. The reality was that the 14 links that were not nofollowed still got one drop of PageRank, or 1/21 of the available PageRank, and the seven that had been nofollowed received no drops of PageRank. But then you may ask where did the remaining seven drops of PageRank go? In actuality, they simply disappeared. So if PageRank sculpting was proven to be ineffective what was the use of writing an article on it? Well although nofollow-based PageRank sculpting doesn’t work, there is now link sculpting.
Link sculpting is based on managing a site’s internal linking so more links flow to the most valuable pages to an organic search. It is similar to information architecture but focuses on how links pass their popularity and how they move customers through a site. An example is if you have a winter sports gear site, then you want to make sure that the best-seller snowboard products are displayed separately and linked globally so that they have the most publicity. Also, customers will want easy access to the products so creating a sidebar with the best-seller products would help more internal link juice flow to the highest value products. Finally having a description of the products on the category page would also help strengthen the popularity of the products with the extra link to the product. Therefore, knowing how PageRank works can help you use practices like link sculpting to increase one’s PageRank in marketing its best-selling products in the hope that customers find the product through web search and eventually make a purchase.