I just read yet another article from a big-name muckity at a big SEO company about “PR Sculpting with the nofollow tag”. It took real restraint not to add a comment (as a rule, I don’t… it just encourages them).

“PR Sculpting with the nofollow tag” is like saying “Cake decorating with chainsaws”. The two don’t go together. The nofollow tag was not created in any way with this purpose in mind, and it doesn’t function well in this usage.

The nofollow tag is used in relation to links using the ‘<a href=’ HTML code within a web page. It was created to tell search engines (read – Google) whether or not a link is “trusted” by the site owner. It can serve to minimize blog comment spam, as it tells Google that links in your comments are not to be trusted, and it can serve to tell Google that certain links on your site are advertisements, not links you personally endorse.

I think the whole confusion arose from the name of the tag itself. Google made a mistake. (no lynch mobs, please!) Google should have named it something else… like notrust or noreference or similar. Because the Google spider (called Googlebot) most certainly follows links with rel=nofollow added to them. You can prove this for yourself by registering a new domain name and uploading a basic site of some sort like a blog; then go place a comment on a blog that uses the nofollow tag, with a link back to your new domain. You’ll see googlebot in your stats in no time, and the referencing site will be the blog you placed the comment on.

We’ve done a number of experiments in SEO Club with nofollow links, and not only does googlebot follow them, Google gives some juice to them as well. You can get a site ranked in a long-tail niche with only comments on blogs with nofollow usage.

So why in the world would you ever use such an amorphous and unpredictable tool for something called SCULPTING?

Yes, sculpting PR is a very real and effective strategy. I’ve taught it for 8 years now. You want complete control over your on-site linking strategy to ensure that maximum “juice” or trust is directed at the most important pages of your site. You also want to maximize the usage of the proper anchor text in these links.

For example, you probably don’t need your Terms of Service page ranked highly in the search engines. It can be indexed and used for internal linking, sure, but it doesn’t need much juice. But you want to have links to your TOS from every page on your site so that you’re covered, legally. It’s simple, really. You just make the links to your TOS page in your navigation javascript or flash; not <a href= links.

Second example: You have a site that you want to rank for the term “low-inome mortgage modification”. That’s the targeted term for the home page of the site. So you want internal links to have “low-income mortgage modification” as the anchor text of the links. If you have only one main site navigation, that might not only look unruly, but also be very confusing to visitors. You want the main navigation to the homepage labeled “home”. Again, you just make the “home” link JS or Flash, and then place a link with the proper anchor text back to the homepage someplace else in the site template or in the navigation.

Those two examples are very simple forms of PR Sculpting. More advanced methodologies… I don’t need to go into detail about here.

So let’s go back to PR Sculpting via nofollow. Are you going to use a tool that denotes “do not trust this link” to point to pages on YOUR OWN SITE? That’s crazy. And it doesn’t work. If the proponents of such methods would simply empirically test these strategies, they’d already know that. What it comes back to is yet another example of an SEO strategy that is simply there to impress clients and newbie SEO enthusiasts.

So go ahead and do some “sclupting” to the PR flow of your site. Just use the proper tools!

Nathan Anderson

Comments Feed

1. Shaun Nestor says:

   Great article, Nate. It constantly amazes me what “gurus” claim in their effort to revolutionize ways to extort the search engines.

   I’m off to cut cake with chainsaws.

   June 11^th, 2009 at 2:37 pm

2. Carl Davison says:

   Hey Nathan,

   Thanks for this. You should do an “SEO expose” product…

   Good stuff.

   Carl

   June 11^th, 2009 at 3:07 pm

3. Taylore Vance says:

   Hi Nathan,
   I’m honored to have you visit the Reiki Ranch. My 25 Turkens are 3 1/2 months old, looking good, healthy, and I love every one of them. But, I need to cut the flock down to about 1 dozen.

   Do you need some more Turkens? These are purebred naked necks from the famous McMurry farms in Iowa.

   Sorry about the bear eating some of your chickens. I think the ones left have trauma — they will get over it. Spend some time with them. Get some slices of bread and feed them little pieces from your hand. I’ll send them some healing energy to let them know they are now safe again. How’s that electric fence working? Good, I hope!

   I had to quit bee keeping/farming because of the bears.

   Taylore
   PS: Was great to see you and Trish at the Unseminar6

   June 16^th, 2009 at 11:08 pm

4. Nathan says:

   Hello Taylore!

   Things are more peaceful around here now… But yes. The remaining hens were clearly traumatized. A number of them were thrown into ‘molt’. They stopped laying, and have been re-growing feathers. We’ve been spending a lot of time together on the front deck and around the property. They are clearly getting over it… if I haven’t. One of the dangers of having larger than a pea brain, eh?

   I LOVE turkens! We have two. They are the heart of the show in our pasture… and both are in molt right now. They’re pretty big birds that lay nicely large tinted brown eggs!

   If you’d like to move some of your layers out… we’d be happy to talk about taking them! Again, we love turkens!

   June 16^th, 2009 at 11:53 pm

5. Silverback Strategies says:

   Even from 2009, this article was way ahead of it’s time. People always try to game the system, and it always ends up biting them back harder.

   I think that keeping your links natural and spreading relevant information does more good than trying to cook the books.

   May 10^th, 2011 at 9:08 am

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