Alright, I've been reluctant to post anything about PageRank sculpting but since I have received a bunch of questions about it recently, here goes:    This is a three part series in how to sculpt PageRank so you have greater authority in Google and can increase your search engine position.  The first lesson simply explores what PR sculpting is, the various methods you can use to achieve it and how to determine if you even need it.

What is PageRank Leak/Bleed?

PageRank bleed/leak is the theory that Page A will lose some of its Page Rank when it links to Page B. This happens whether the links are internal or external as far as concept and effects. Even when there is a direct link back there still is Page Rank bleed.

The theory is that any single page can only pass up to 85% of its total PR value to any page it is linking to.  The total value of the page given to any site it links to is calculated by dividing it's total value by the number of links on the page itself (links, meaning anything you can click that do not have the nofollow tag on them).  Yes, that means the combined value of internal and external links.

RESOURCE: Sculpting Your PageRank For Maximum SEO Impact

RESOURCE: The PageRank Formula

FOR EXAMPLE: If you received a link from a PR5 page that linked out to 100 other pages, you would calculate the total value of that one link to your site as:

(PR5 * .085)/100

RESOURCE: The original Bob Wakfer PageRank Calculation Table  (while now quite old now this document is well worth a read)

Read also: What is PageRank bleed

Just a note on my favorite topic-  are you beginning to see why you don't want to have a blogroll on your home page?  You will leak too much PageRank and it it will make it harder initially for you to build rank.  Basiclaly- a large blog roll dilutes your PR and makes more work for you.

Read also: Does Google hate your blogroll?

What is PageRank Sculpting?

PageRank sculpting is the act of optimizing your pages to flow PageRank from your highest PR pages through to your most important internal pages while shunting PR from unimportant pages by directing Google to no longer crawl or index those unimportant or irrelevant pages.  Why do you WANT Google to start ignoring some of your pages?  Because as you flow your high PR through to only your other valuable Pages you increase the PR on those pages and as you drop the pages that have no relevant content or PR from your site- you leave Google with only high quality, high PR pages.  Starting to see the value yet?  You have now increased the ratio of high PR pages on your site and look like an overall more authoritative and relevant site.  Basically, we have stopped Google from wasting its time with our loser pages and kept it circling our important pages.

Read also: Whiteboard Friday the juice is loose

This technique is not recommended for:

Because this is an advanced technique, I feel the need to put a disclaimer in sphere:

1.       People who are not familiar with basic SEO principles.  Inexperienced people using any one of these tactics WILL screw up their sites, so unless you feel confident with your SEO knowledge, then wait until you do before attempting this technique.  

2.       New sites or sites that do not have much content as there is no need to control PageRank if you don't have a volume of content or a reasonable PageRank.  Please do not even consider using this technique on site that have under 100 pages of content.  This technique is most effective on sites with many hundreds or thousands of pages of content.

3.       All other SEO tactics should be implemented before attempting this technique.   This technique is best used on sites that are already fully search engine optimized.

Read also: Don't buy into the paranoia about PageRank sculpting

*Note: Stephan Spencer is considered the authority on PR Sculpting

4.       Also, be aware, I am teaching ONLY very simplistic implementations of these techniques.  More aggressive versions of this technique are best left to professionals.

Read also: 8 Reasons why the original PageRank Formula May Be Flawed

What are the various methods of PageRank Sculpting?

• Sculpting through the No-follow attribute: Using the no follow tag on links to unnecessary, conversion form or low PageRank pages.
• Scupting through the Robots.txt meta tag: Using the robots.txt tag to guide Google to pages you want it to crawl and index and away from pages that you do want it to visit and index.
• Content siloing: advanced method of grouping content into categories/folders that easier to crawl- this allows you to flow PageRank through certain types of related content.  Basically, you only link to pages on your site with the same theme, to make it easier to rank for keywords and keyword groups

Read also: How to build quality backlinks to your real estate blog

Read also:PageRank sculpting - Siloing and more

Is Sculpting PageRank Google approved?

YES.Even Matt Cutts has chimed in on it. In a September 08 interview with Matt on SEOmoz, he was quoted as saying:

The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.

See a how you sculpt PageRank

RSS Pieces, because we are an older site with a lot of posts and forms has been sculpting its PageRank for quite some time through both the nofollow tag and content siloing. Below is an image showing the links I placed the nofollows on.  All links hilighted in red are nofollow.  I highly recommend instaling SEO for Firefox so you too can see what links are no follow on the various blogs and sites you visit:

Stay tuned for the next installment where I teach you how to use these techniques on your site!

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