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Sphinn Home » SEO
PageRank Sculpting is Dead? Good Riddance
SEO News Source: http://www.traffick.com
Published: Jun 04, 2009 - 07:16 am
Story Found By: MattMcGee 982 Days ago
Category: SEO
Great post from Andrew Goodman: "Long term, search fails when site owners try to "tell" search engines which pages are important, short of burying the unimportant ones in their architecture so they’re literally invisible. Importance shouldn’t be arbitrarily determined by site owners, though certainly users and engines appreciate it if they provide indications."
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from bonniegibbons 982 Days ago #
Votes: 3

Andrew’s point is a good one about SEOs’ complicity in the mythologization of PageRank sculpting, but this new development has uncovered something bewildering, whether it’s really a change or we’re just now learning how it’s really been all along.Matt Cutt’s current revelation is that every link on your page siphons PR whether it’s nofollowed or not. This causes conflict between SEO and user experience in two new ways I can think of. It creates an incentive to minimize internal links for reasons completely unrelated to user experience. Nofollowing your comment links was useful tool. But since any link in a comment will bleed PR off the page without the publisher’s control, there’s no reason to nofollow other than fear of punishment. The publisher’s best bet becomes disallowing html links within comments. In turn, users will be inconvenienced by having to paste URLs, and overall commenting will decline, because getting your link out there, even if nofollowed, is a reason people comment.It seems like Google, the company that built its brand on sophisticated handling of links, has evolved to the point of suspecting/discouraging any link whatsoever, internal or external. The irony...

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from traffick 982 Days ago #
Votes: 2

Hi Bonnie, that’s a thoughtful comment.I think it may illustrate that there is either a flaw in PageRank, PageRank doesn’t work as billed, or that PageRank as a signal is so fraught with issues that if not useless or "dead," then it needs to be surrounded by so many other ranking factors as to eventually deeply discount its weight.After all, our goal in building this big map of the Web - as a search engine engineer anyway - is just to use that structure to help in the correct rank-ordering of query results. PageRank is presumably just an interesting way to get to that relevancy goal.Links passively "point" to other places. They do not speak nearly enough to quality, relevance, behavior, etc. And they have the unfortunate flaw of "siphoning" authority in different ways that are potentially irrational if the algo is sufficiently stupid and people design their sites around non-algorithmic priorities.Then again I believe that the majority of sites would probably benefit from putting fewer links on the page anyway.Do I believe that Google PageRank currently passes PR juice equally across 100 links so that each counts for 1%? (A state of affairs that made use of nofollow a workaround often aimed solely at the PageRank formula?) Do I believe that this is a good way to do it and that this is how link juice will be passed by the search engines of the future?Maybe and no.Or possibly, no and NO.

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