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PageRank Sculpting Is The Badhat SEO Technique From Hell

PageRank Sculpting is one of those really bad concepts that just won’t go away. The PageRank sculpting model falsely suggests that, by hiding internal links from search engines, a Website can improve its search visibility. Since the idea was first proposed in 2007, no one has ever been able to show that it works. In fact, last year Google showed that it does NOT work.

You would think that after seeing Googler Matt Cutts come out and say “[Pagerank sculpting] isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank” people would get the message that PageRank Sculpting IS NOT THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY TO UTILIZE YOUR PAGERANK.

Nonetheless, some rather surprising people (including but not limited to Rand Fishkin and Eric Enge) have failed to embrace the immediately obvious fact that PageRank sculpting does NOT work. Remember, Matt Cutts told everyone that Google “figured that site owners or people running tests would notice [that PageRank flow affected by "rel='nofollow'" on internal links had changed], but they didn’t.”

Completely Failed SEO Analysis Misled The SEO Industry

All the people claiming they were working miracles through their PageRank sculpting had absolutely no clue for over a year that their “sculpting” had been negated by Google. The reason Google disabled the PR Sculpting “Off Switch” was that “some sites that attempted to change how PageRank flowed within their sites … ended up excluding … high-quality information….”

Based on that absolutely awful analytical record, reasonable people should conclude that SEOs would not be able to hit the broad side of a barn with a baseball bat — even if one helps them swing the bat in the right direction (e.g. Googlers consistently and repeatedly advised people NOT to sculpt PageRank going all the way back to 2007).

You may recall that one of the early and oft-cited justifications for attempting to sculpt PageRank in the first place was that “unimportant pages” were outranking more important pages in search results. Rather than fix this problem, people in the SEO community leaped upon PageRank Sculpting as a hot new idea that would impress the masses — thus creating an even worse problem to mask the original problem.

Proof That PageRank Sculpting Harms Websites Emerges

For months I’ve been monitoring requests for help in various SEO and Google support forums. Many, many Webmasters have come out of the woodwork complaining about lost Google rankings, sites not being indexed, etc. (And additionally dozens of Webmasters have privately asked me to look at their sites through forum-based private messaging.) In nearly every case where I investigated the sites’ structures and backlink profiles I was able to show that at least one of several factors was the probable cause of the Websites’ search invisibility:

• The sites were using “rel=’nofollow’” on internal links
• The sites were using “noindex,nofollow” in meta tags
• The sites were using “disallow” in robots.txt
• The sites were using 302-redirects or other odd functions on internal links
• The sites had few or no inbound links
• The sites had obtained many suspicious links (comprising 70% or more of their backlink profiles)

On more than one occasion when I suggested that suspicious backlink problems might be an issue, Google employees tacitly agreed with me without actually saying that was the problem.

By far, however, the most common issue I have found with sites that have lost search traffic, search rankings, and search visibility is that they implemented PageRank Sculpting by use of “rel=’nofollow’” or “noindex,nofollow” meta tags on their pages. By preventing major search engines from crawling and indexing their content, these sites effectively removed themselves from the long tail of search.

How PageRank Sculpting Harms Websites

And by preventing the search engines from indexing all those pages, those sites effectively deleted most of their own accumulated PageRank.

POOF! PageRank vanished simply because it was never allowed to flow through the site, not because it “evaporated” through “rel=’nofollow’”.

Of course link-poor sites don’t have much PageRank to work with in the first place, so preventing unique articles from attracting and passing on PageRank is anything but an effective SEO strategy.

*NEW* PageRank Sculpting Techniques Worse Than The Original

Notice that PageRank sculpting doesn’t simply harm your site through “rel=’nofollow’”. Any method of hiding internal, navigational or cross-promotional links from search engines will reduce a Website’s search visibility and reach. That means that all the NEW methods of “sculpting” PageRank will inflict at least as much harm, if not more, on the Wesbites that implement them.

So using 302-redirects on internal links, embedding navigation into inline frames, using encrypted Javascript links, embedding “noindex” on pages, disallowing robots from directories of user-accessible content — all the so-called “Google-friendly” methods of restricting PageRank flow through a Website (now being promoted by various SEO pundits, gurus, and bloggers) are just as bad and harmful to your site as merely using “rel=’nofollow’” on internal links.

The noindex and robots.txt methods pretty much ensure that you are taking a lot of content out of the running, making your site less competitive, less visible, and less likely to draw more traffic.

One Plausible-sounding Variation Does Not Justify Badhat SEO

Rand Fishkin did propose consolidating pages in the hope of combining PageRank into fewer pages. Of all the 2nd-generation PageRank sculpting techniques, this one at least preserves the indexability of content — but then he coupled that idea with the extremely bad and ill-reasoned suggestion that people who have already dropped tons of “nofollows” into their internal navigation links do nothing to fix that problem (to leave the “nofollow” attributes in place).

Remember that SEOmoz has yet to publish a viable, credible test or report that shows they know how to manage PageRank flow (or even just correctly interpret the data they collect). So the recommendation to leave everything in place should be ignored (unless you’d rather just work on other projects). You can still love Rand for being the great guy he is. In fact you should continue to respect him for being the fantastic marketer he is. Keep watching the videos SEOmoz puts out. Just don’t believe them when they say that PageRank Sculpting (still) works because they’ve never been able to show that it does.

(NOTE: In the comments to his blog post cited above, Matt Cutts did say to one questioner: “this is a change that’s been live for well over a year; if you’ve got a site that works for you and you’re happy with, I wouldn’t worry about going back to change a lot of work.” While I understand Matt’s reluctance to offer generic do this/don’t do this advice — I am sure his comment is considered justification for the Do Nothing To Fix The Problem Principle.)

Badhat SEOs Are Compounding Past Errors With New Trouble

PageRank sculpting never fixed the original problem (bad site design) in the first place. All the sites that turned to PageRank Sculpting to resolve that issue simply made their situations worse. They piled one bad design decision on top of another.

Any SEO who cannot get the root URL of a domain to outrank the “About Us” page without blocking crawlers is completely and utterly incompetent, in my opinion. Don’t do business with those people, if the best they can suggest is that you hide internal, navigational links from search engines in order to reduce the PageRank of the “About Us” or other incidental pages.

I noticed with some amusement that certain pro-Sculptors never said another word on the subject after Matt Cutts pulled the rug out from under their snake oil SEO technique last summer. I hope they quietly went back to their clients and got those sites to remove the internalized nofollow code because in my opinion it is professionally irresponsible to leave that kind of “solution” in place.

The real problem lately, however, is that some people continue to talk about PageRank Sculpting as if it works. They clearly are ignoring the memo Google sent out and they are advising other people to ignore it. That is REALLY bad advice.

Goodhat SEOs MUST Disavow PageRank Sculpting

PageRank Sculpting is the process of hiding internal navigation links from search engines. It doesn’t matter whether you do it with “rel=’nofollow’” or “noindex,nofollow” or “disallow” or some screwy Javascript encryption scheme. When you hide internal navigation from a search engine you destroy crawlability, you destroy index visibility, and you deny your content the PageRank it is rightfully entitled to.

Is this really the kind of “optimization” the SEO community wants to be known for? Because if this is the flag YOU want to wave for YOUR SEO expertise, you can count me among the people who consider you to be nothing more than scam artists, snake oil salesmen, charlatans, and amateurs.

It’s time for the SEO community to stop promoting harmful tactics that bring absolutely nothing positive to the table. You can love your friends and conference idols all you want. You can promote their blogs above mine in all the ways you can think of. I don’t care about that — but if I were one of your clients who had taken your advice to sculpt PageRank — and if you had not come back to me and advised me to take down the “nofollow” attributes — I’d be suing you right now.

I’m not advising anyone to file lawsuits against PageRank Sculpting SEO companies (lawsuits are expensive AND the courts don’t understand this stuff at all) — but this kind of repeat bad behavior is what leads to lawsuits and legislation. The SEO community needs to get out of the PageRank Sculpting business as soon as possible. It IS a scam. I want nothing to do with it.

No one in this industry has any excuse for promoting such a clearly debunked and discredited technique. To ALL SEOs who advocate sculpting PageRank I say: Swallow your pride, get over it, and shut up when you feel the urge to talk about “sculpting PageRank”. You cannot do it, you don’t know how to do it, and you have no business telling anyone else to do it.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are strictly those of the author and do not reflect the views or opinions of any other person, party, or entity.