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You cannot see, feel, hear, smell, or touch PageRank.

You cannot in any way measure PageRank.

Nonetheless, you may believe you’re sculpting PageRank in some way, perhaps by using “rel=’nofollow’” on internal links to what you believe are “unimportant” pages; or perhaps by controlling where your inbound links point to; or perhaps by using your robots.txt file to disallow some pages on your site; or perhaps by using 301 redirects to alter the flow of PageRank through your site; or perhaps by using “noindex,follow” in your robots meta tag on some pages; or perhaps by using Javascript or Flash for some internal navigation.

There are many ways to directly and indirectly impact the flow of PageRank throughout your site, but you can neither shape it nor sculpt it because:

1. You don’t know which of your pages currently possess PageRank
2. You don’t know which of your pages currently pass PageRank
3. You don’t know how much PageRank any of your pages possess
4. You don’t know how often PageRank is calculated for your pages
5. You don’t know which images of your pages are used for PageRank calculations

If you have a fairly static site whose page contents rarely change, you can probably assume 3-6 months after each page is created that you know what the PageRank image for those pages should be.

If you place one outbound link with unique anchor text on all your pages, you may be able to determine which of your pages is passing value through their links. However, you want to avoid use of nonsense expressions like “XPFTERGL”. Use real words. Use common words. Use them in relatively brief phrases of five or few words. And the expressions only have to be unique to your own site (because you should be able to use site: queries to test for the passing of anchor text between your pages).

Being able to estimate which of your pages possess PageRank, which of your pages pass PageRank, and which page images are used to calculate PageRank for your site is better than nothing, but it still leaves you with to cope with the inability to determine how much PageRank any of your pages possess and pass AND the inability to determine how often your PageRank is recalculated.

But there are more factors you have to take into consideration if you really want to sculpt PageRank on a site. For example, you need to get as many pages crawled and indexed as possible. That means you have to provide the search engines both the means and the incentive to crawl and index your sites. More crawling tends to happen than indexing.

Telling search engines where NOT to fetch content from doesn’t in any way tell them where to look. If you feel the wrong pages on your site are being crawled and indexed, you need to point more links toward those pages.

You can do that in one of three ways:

1. You can use your most frequently crawled and reindexed pages to link to your least often crawled and indexed pages
2. You can get links from other sites to link to your least frequently crawled and reindexed pages
3. You can add more links to pages across your site to the least-frequently crawled and reindexed pages
4. You can add secondary crawl pages to your site and have all your pages link to them (some people call these HTML sitemap pages)

As some people will be quick to point out, a large site can do all of these things and still have pages that are not crawled and indexed, or pages that are only infrequently crawled and indexed. Of course, if the links you create or obtain are not passing value, that is why their destinations are not benefitting from the links.

Hence, if you want to move PageRank around your site, you have to work with what you can find out about PageRank. The pages most likely to be frequently crawled and reindexed are the most important pages on your site. You should use them to point links to your least frequently crawled and reindexed pages. In other words, using the pages a search engine deems to be your most important pages to point to pages YOU feel are most important sends an important signal to the search engine.

This approach is less crude and more effective than adding “rel=’nofollow’” to your internal navigation (or using Javascript and Flash to strip your internal navigation of PageRank). Starving pages of PageRank doesn’t somehow squeeze the PageRank so that it begins flowing toward pages it previously didn’t find before. PageRank flows through links, and the more links you point at a particular page on your site, the more PageRank that page will receive.

Now, while it’s silly to think in terms of hoarding PageRank (it’s going to flow out of your site regardless of what you do to “contain” it), there are some prudent actions you should take to prevent people from using your site as a springboard for crawling, indexing, PageRank, and anchor text.

1. Block all external linking you don’t directly create yourself
2. Require human-verified registration before anyone can place links on your site
3. Block popular spammer email hosts like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc. from being used in your registration system
4. Block email hosts that LOOK like the major ones (all legitimate Google Gmail, for example, comes from gmail.com and not the .org or .net addresses)
5. Use “rel=’nofollow’” on all outbound links in your forum posts, forum signatures, and blog comments
6. Use robots.txt and/or robots meta tags to prevent crawling of user profile pages

In short, make registering with your site as unattractive for link spammers as possible. Force your fellow SEOs to practice real search engine optimization and real link building. Link leeches don’t just draw off your PageRank — they put you at risk for being penalized or filtered because you link to the “wrong” Web neighborhoods.

There are still sites that don’t autonofollow the outbound links you drop on them. However, most of the pages on those sites won’t pass value. If you know of any such sites, follow this advice:

1. Do NOT share those sites on blogs, in forums, or in articles
2. Point links with unique anchor text from your own site to the pages where you drop links
3. Use unique anchor text as much as possible to point back to your own site
4. Diversify and exercise restraint
5. Practice the SEO Method: Experiment, Evaluate, Adjust

Unique anchor text is the only means you have available for determining if a page passes or receives value from another page through links. Learn to use unique anchor text, but also learn to be discreet. Every time someone in the SEO community tells other people which sites are open to abuse, the available resources for free one-way links shrink. The SEO community is its own worst enemy because people don’t have sense enough to keep their mouths shut.

Don’t openly share your unique anchor text tags. Other people can duplicate the anchor text to mess with your analytics. Trust me, I know this is being done to unsuspecting SEOs.

Don’t use linking resources for article/blog post ideas — you just reveal how naive you are, and I’m sure the site owners won’t appreciate your directing all the spam link bots at their sites.

DO link to sites you feel provide good information and DO describe that good information accurately.

DO share ideas about how to create good content and DO acknowledge good content through your links to other sites.

Even though you cannot prevent the search engine from flowing your PageRank on to other sites, you CAN help the search engine figure out where that PageRank should go. PageRank flows THROUGH a page, not TO a page. Most people in the SEO industry just don’t get it. As soon as you do start to get it, you’ll be a step ahead of the pack.