Matt Cutts on PageRank Sculpting - "It's not worth the effort."

There are other topics and interesting subjects that were discussed at SMX Advanced 2008. You can read about them here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/smx-advanced-2008/

 

I was seriously considering PR sculpting and here is the verdict for it already.

Good to get a confirmation

 

Whether Google has multiple penalties and whether a penalty for PR sculpting is one of them are two different things. Given the nature of the NDA, what I think he was saying was that it's far better to get PageRank (and everything that goes with it) by building a great Web site with a strong internal architecture and linking structure, rather than telling the search engines to ignore specific pages in a site.

 

Build a better site woks for me.

 

I didn't mean to say google has penalty for PR sculpting. I understand he means the efforts better put elsewhere

I just commented on that line because it's an often asked question !!

 

Just a case of me thinking ahead and trying to answer questions for other readers before they ask is all.

You should know me well enough by now!

 

There is no need to be so obsessed with building PageRank.

Just make sure your website is accessible and well structured, then you need to regularly update it with unique quality content - natural backlinks (from people that liked your content and link to your site) and PR will come along as a side-effect of your efforts. At least that is my experience.

 

lol. We should rename you to Dan Thinking Ahead Schulz !!

I am game for building 'compelling' sites and hoping to get some search engine love

 

In a sense why would you want your My Account or View Your Shopping Cart crawled and indexed by search engines? I see where he was going with this; but still I don't see any reason to have certain pages indexed at all, with regard ofcourse to crawling allocation on sites that don't update frequently

 

Pages like that need to be blocked anyway since they're not going to do anything - they're not useful for search engines, after all. And besides, they contain sensitive information that is only available when logged in to begin with. Can a search engine spider "log in" to view "its account" or its "shopping cart"? Of course not. Furthermore, even crawling those pages wastes bandwidth anyway, so blocking them outright allows that bandwidth to be allocated elsewhere.

Such blocking isn't what I consder to be PageRank sculpting, but instead common sense.

 

Pagerank on the whole is seeing a LOT of hype and time wasted by a lot of people, when it's really a very SMALL part of determining a page's health and value. The time some people spend obsessing on it is usually better spent elsewhere. You can have pagerank 5 and barely any daily traffic, or pagerank 9 and a million visitors a day. For all intents and purposes it's a fairly meaningless number, especially with many search engines devaluing it.

There are only two MEANINGFUL numbers: unique visits and repeat visits - anything else is bullshit. Time and time again I end up working with clients who have pagerank 5 or higher that you dig into their logs and it's nothing but uniques. Getting clients to your page is one thing - KEEPING THEM on your page is another, and usually the most neglected.

That's the biggest problem with SEO - 80 to 90% of the people doing it are spending time on little more than polishing a turd.

 

You do realize only Google uses the Pagerank system? In fact it's patent to Google technology.

These have nothing to do with SEO, you can obtain this from PPC or internet marketing, not just organic traffic.

Or they waste time reading incorrect information.

 

Yet work-alikes exist in many other search engines. It's just measurement of backlinks after all. While the pagerank ALGORYTHM is patented, there's enough 'prior art' for similar systems to be put in place... AND... just because it's patented in the US doesn't mean a Russian search like Yandex is going to give a flying...

... AND you can use thier own library to do a lookup - meaning other search engines can still LOOK at google's pagerank and make use of it. Oh, and you do realize google LICENSES their algorythms to other companies, right? What the hells the point of a patent if you can't charge other people to use it? (remember, google has to PAY for their hosting somehow - and for all the talk of advertising...)

Unique visits have nothing to do with SEO? RIGHT. I'd buy that for a dollar. How does one GET unique visits again? Backlinks and search engines, that's how.

Or don't understand how the underlying systems actually WORK.

 

Most people don't like to spend the time to build a compelling site though. They always seek out the easiest way to make money or skip steps.

It's funny yes but true.

 

Well there really isnt that much effort involved. I also find it funny that Matt Cutts is saying this, because it was him who stated it was ok to use nofollow for other functions besides blog comment spam.

What does this issue have to do with building a compelling site?

 

While I agree that nit picking about every link might not be worth it, I've had positive benefits from some site wide changes. I had many links in the navigation bar on my site going to Flickr. Multiply the links in the bar by each page on my site, and I had thousands of outgoing links to Flickr. I put "nofollow" on all those links, and saw a quick improvement. Link juice going to Flickr instead went to my pages.

I'm not sure a few links would have mattered, but thousands did.

 

Nofollowing the links to Flickr would be a wise thing to do, yes. In fact, it's something I often recommend. Another thing I recommend is keeping the images on the site rather than outsourcing them to another.

 

Great discussion. That "polishing the turd" comment is funny but gets the point across well.

 

Interesting post and link Dan. + rep for that.

In my case I have no concern for having contact, privacy policy, etc. pages indexed. I certainly don't want to waste even the slightest PR on these types of pages. I chose to nofollow them and it took me possibly five minutes of my time to do so.

The only problem I see with nofollowing internal pages is that there is a good chance those pages will be dropped from Google's index and not appear in Google Sitelinks. Not something I would do for a business that gets plenty of searches for its company name or a site concerned about Sitelinks.

From my experience Google will drop the page(s) from its index if they are internally nofollowed, while Yahoo will not deindex the page(s). Live is an animal of its own...

 

You homepage should rank for its business name, so is that really a concern?