A war of ideals is raging through the search engine optimization industry. On the one side are search engines like Google and fundamental-minded search engine optimization experts like Vanessa Fox, Shari Thurow, Jill Whalen, Adam Audette, Michael Martinez, and others. On the other side are well-known SEO pundits like Rand Fishkin, Brent Payne, and Eric Enge. The issue: Pagerank sculpting. Pagerank sculpting advocates say that by hiding links from search engines you can improve your search results. Is that the truth or just another SEO boondoggle (as Jill Whalen puts it)?
Pagerank sculpting was first attempted by Google itself, according to Google engineer Matt Cutts, who says they prevented new video listings on YouTube from leeching inordinate amounts of Pagerank off the popular domain’s front page. Video submissions scroll through YouTube’s root URL very quickly and so are not really very important, but if Googlebot catches a video listing there when it crawls the page, that listing will get some of YouTube’s highest value Pagerank. Some SEOs like Dan Thies and Rand Fishkin concluded that static links to important but secondary pages should be blocked in a similar way (by using the controversial “rel=’nofollow’” link attribute) to preserve Pagerank for the rest of the site.
Although this argument seemed reasonable to some folks in the SEO industry, critics like Thurow and Martinez baked it seven different ways from Sunday. Thurow predicted that Pagerank sculpting would be devalued by Google and other search engines. Martinez said this was just the failed notion of Pagerank hoarding come back in a new form. Pagerank hoarding suggests you can prevent Pagerank from passing to other sites by either not linking to them or by hiding your links from search engines. But Pagerank is designed to flow out from a site regardless of whether you link out. You cannot hoard Pagerank.
Therefore Pagerank sculpting received a very dubious welcome by fundamentalists. Why put “unimportant” pages on a site at all? they asked. Pagerank sculpting SEO providers claimed for about 2 years that their tests and studies showed that there were significant positive gains to be realized from Pagerank sculpting. And then in the summer months of 2009 Matt Cutts announced that so many Websites were hurting from Pagerank sculpting that — more than a year previously — Google had to change how it assigns Pagerank to help preserve the important pages that were being lost from the search index.
That should have been the end of that, but it wasn’t. Michael Martinez writes on the Best SEO Blog that some people in the industry are still pitching the value of Pagerank sculpting — which he now equates with a scam. Since the SEO industry has been formally advised that Pagerank sculpting only hurts Websites, any attempt to sell Pagerank sculpting services must be greeted with great ethical skepticism. And to make matters worse, Pagerank sculpting SEOs have developed new methods for hiding links that Google may not be able to counter.