PageRank Sculpting Phase Two

Last post on this one from me (famous last words…).

Great article from Danny Sullivan today on PageRank sculpting. Saves me a lot of work, thanks Danny. Also, included is a video from Matt Cutts from May (I will include below in any case), which unfortunately I missed the first time around (if I had seen this and really thought about it and combined it with the data I was seeing from some old JavaScript links, I might have been well ahead of the game on the big two recent developments).

So, it looks like sparse internal linking, not linking out, turning comments off and iFrames will now be the order of the day! I hope not. Here are a few (white hat) things that you might want to try.

Combining your ‘legals’ and ‘privacy’ pages in to one page and linking to it more intelligently. I have no idea on the legal ease of where these pages should be linked from on your site (maybe someone could comment), so do this at you own risk. I am also absolutely certain that Google has factored in some weighting to these pages already, so don’t sweat this one too much.
Think about your other navigational links and make them better for users and Google (how many ‘about us’ pages do you really need?). In this I mean think about if you really need to link to a page or if you really need that site wide link to an unprofitable area. As we know ‘nofollowing’ no longer works and in some ways this is a good excuse to get your house in order from a usability, ‘weight’ flow and ‘weight’ wastage perspective.
Remember a good website should embrace what the ‘web’ is about. Linking to sites and pages is a good thing if done for the right reasons and well. So all you ‘nofollow’ addicts should think a little about the trust your site develops by being an authority site. Authority sites do link to other sites (and give PageRank away). Rather than delete all of your outbound links that you previously ‘nofollowed’, open some of them up and ‘dofollow’ the ones that add value.

There will be a million takes on this new news and I am waiting to see what the fall out is. Either way Google makes the rule and we have to follow (no pun intended) them. Didn’t you know that? If you were Google would you do it any other way? Remember they own the search engine and we choose to use it.

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