PR Sculpting is now dead (or at least traditional PR Sculpting using rel="nofollow")... The way it used to work is that if a page had a PR of X and that same page had 10 outbound links on it then each outbound link would be passed approximately X/10 PR. If you nofollowed 5 of the 10 outbound links then the remaining 5 outbound links would be passed X/5 PR (i.e. nofollow'ing half of the outbounds would double the amount of PR passed to the remaining followed outbounds). So people began nofollow'ing links to things like about-us, contact-us, terms of service, privacy policy, etc. (i.e. pages that they didn't really care about ranking) so that extra PR would be passed to the remaining followed outbound links. In other words, they would sculpt where the PR was funneled by using nofollow on unimportant links. But last month Matt Cutts announced that Google had changed how nofollow affected the flow of PR. Read the entire post but the crucial part is the paragraph just before the first Q&A: Now if a page has a PR of X and 10 outbound links - 5 followed and 5 nofollowed - then the 5 followed links are passed only X/10 PR and the PR that would have been passed to the 5 nofollowed links is thrown away... goes into a blackhole... wasted... So it does absolutely no good to place rel="nofollow" on internal links. In fact it reduces the overall PR of all of the pages on your site because it creates PR sinks... PR blackholes... where PR goes in but doesn't come out (or some of it doesn't come out) to be recirculated throughout your site. If you want to do PR Sculpting now, you have to do it using good internal linking and/or javascript linking to direct the flow of PR.
Thanks Canonical, man you always help others in each & every query or problems, i remember that you have helped me too in one of my problem.
Amazing isn't it, how Google can swing through 360 degrees and then expect everyone to just jump through the new hoops.
Thank you for the helpful post. + rep added. These are the kind of posts that make it worthwhile to wade through the tons of noise posts here.
Pagerank isn't dead. Traditional PR Scultping with the nofollow tag is... Here is a new method that I see a lot of people adopting (as well as myself). It is called link consilation. What you do- -Combine all your similar content that can afford to be on a single page and then anchor it. Just use the old <a ="name"> then when you reference it with a link or anything yoursite.com/#name You can check an example of how I did this...still have more work to do but here is an example: http://www.rehabilitation-center.org/addiction-training-seminars.html Hope that helps. PS: There are other ways to sculpt but most involve JS or frames.
I should also add...to pass any links you may have on the pages that you will combine....301 them to their proper anchor or the page they are on. The link juice will pass as well as the anchor text. Good luck, Sean One more thing: If you can ever take advice from someone in this forum, Canonical is the man. He helped me out with a very unqiue issue before. He is a maven to the death.
I don't think the 301s are necessary. Google (and likely the other major engines) ignore the "#" and everything to the right of it in the URL when indexing URLs. They know it's an anchor and they get the same content whether they request href="http://www.example.com/somepage.html, href="http://www.example.com/somepage.html#anchor1, href="http://www.example.com/somepage.html#anchor2, etc. So <a href="http://www.example.com/somepage.html#someanchor">link text</a> is seen and indexed by Google as <a href="http://www.example.com/somepage.html">link text</a>.