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Dead-end PageRank-sculpting?

About one year ago I did a posting on the subject of "Controlling the internal linking with nofollow” which triggered one of this years SEO-Hypes. The fundamental thought here is that each sites inherent “strength” can be redirected by using nofollow for useless links so that the ranking of the remaining pages, which will receive more LinkJuice from then on, will profit from it.

A nice idea, in principle, of which I still believe that it works. And as usual for SEO-concepts that are easy to understand, at least at first glance, this method, which is now being called PageRank-Sculpting, is gaining in popularity. Those who use a browser which highlights links that are tagged for nofollow, will often surf to sites that are generously using nofollow. It is sad that one thought is being left out of the equation: that which is not there, can not be (better) distributed. It seems that siteoperators are often using more time on constructing elaborate nofollow-concepts rather than promoting the expansion of backlinks, which shows that they have their priorities wrong. Nofollow has the ability, as one of the last steps in the optimization of a site, to give it the final polish, but it will never (!) be any help in solving fundamental problems in the SEO of a site.

By the way: out of curiosity I examined the homepages of all De-domains with a PageRank of 7 or more for nofollow. Out of the 2.008 Domains, only 123 used the nofollow-attribute on their homepage.
Out of those with the highest number of nofollow-links, with Yigg.de (140 nofollow-links) and Wikio (106) we have two sites up front who, for themselves, have no content ...