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PageRank Sculpting

Seeing how Matt Cutts explained his idea of PageRank sculpting a little more in-depth in a blogpost, it is time to summarize the discussion on this topic and draw up some conclusions.

About two years ago, the idea of PageRank sculpting, which means the purposeful arrangement of PageRank flow within a page, came into existence – back then, I wrote something about it in my post “Controlling the internal linking with nofollow”. The basic idea is to take the available PageRank (which will be used synonymously with “linkjuice” from here on out) and direct it to the important parts of the Website, while keeping it out of things like the legal notice. This was based on the theory, that Google splits the PageRank equally along the links on a page. This would mean, that the less links you have, the more PageRank those links would get. Seeing how the removal of links is usually not very pretty from a usability point-of-view, you would use the nofollow-attribute for this instead.

Change of rules
Through their mouthpiece Matt Cutts, Google now announced, that the rules have changed: While, in the past, the PageRank was split between all the links that were not marked nofollow, the blogposting now announced, that, for about a year, linkjuice is split between all the links on a page – while the nofollow-links are still not flowing any PageRank, making them useless. Here a visualization of the status, before and after:


While before, the nofollow-link was not counted towards the PageRank distribution, which meant that the flowed PageRank was divided by four, now we get a different picture: now, even the nofollow-link gets his calculated amount, though, thanks to the nofollow-attribute, that PageRank will not be allocated but will just “disappear”.

Implications and consequences
So what are the consequences of this change? Those pages, that “moderately” used PageRank sculpting to keep sites like the legal-notice and shopping-carts or similar pages from getting PageRank, don't have to make any changes – for them it still makes no sense to hoard PageRank.

Those projects that have (massively) used nofollow-links to cure deficits in the structure of their site will have to rethink their method: for these sites, there will be no way to avoid a fundamental change as to control the linkjuice through the sites structure rather than through omitting certain links (Jens wrote some wise words on this topic). In context, I am not much of a friend of trying to find ways to hide links through JavaScript or Flash: Google has changed the rules and trying to find a loophole will not do you much good because, eventually, it will be found-out and closed.

One thing that I consider to be (very) problematic, is the way this change will affect if and how external links are permitted. While, until now, it was the case, that the worth of a link, that I posted in a blogposting, did not change with the number of comments that post got. It seems that now something else is the case: the posted link will loose some of its worth with every comment (=nofollow-link). As far as I am concerned, I don't much care in this case but I am sure that, in the future, we will get a number of blogs, forums and similar sites, that will limit the external linking they allow.