Folksonomics

Every industry has its controversies and disagreements but the search engine optimization industry is one professional community that can ill afford to have a major divisive issue. And yet, today a very irrational and discredited practice is once again commanding headlines on major SEO Websites. PageRank Sculpting is a radical technique that calls for hiding navigation links from search engines to prevent unimportant pages from outranking more important pages from a site in the search results. This idea, first proposed in 2007, was shown to be irresponsible and foolish by leading SEO industry writers at that time.

Nonetheless, some people have dedicated themselves to promoting PageRank Sculpting despite a growing amount of evidence that showed it did not work. PageRank sculpting was in fact completely discredited during a summer 2009 SEO conference when Google employee Matt Cutts revealed that Google had taken steps to prevent PageRank Sculpting from taking effect. Google did this — either late in 2007 or early 2008 — because it had determined that many sites were suffering lost search visibility because of PageRank Sculpting. At the time PageRank Sculpting advocates called for the use of the “rel=’nofollow’” link attribute on navigational links to hide some pathways from search engines.

A quick perusal of Google’s Webmaster help forums today reveals many people who have attempted to sculpt PageRank are now complaining that their Websites are no longer appearing in Google’s index. And yet, despite Google’s clear public advice not to use PageRank Sculpting on Websites, some people in the SEO community are trying to bring it back through new methods of hiding navigation links from search engines.

Although one would hope that the voice of reason prevails, in the world of SEO one-upmanship some people are hoping to prove that PageRank Sculpting really works, even though a major search engine has shown that it cannot possibly help a Website because it has only harmed Websites. PageRank sculpting is a dangerous, reckless, irresponsible technique that no rational, competent search engine optimization specialist should be practicing on a client site. There is no benefit to be gained from PageRank Sculpting and all the SEOs who claim their tests show that PageRank Sculpting works have been proven wrong.

If anyone advises you to hide internal links from search engines, to sculpt PageRank, or to “consolidate your links”, ignore them. Certainly don’t pay them for such bad advice. Whether it’s called Link Consolidation or PageRank Sculpting, the practice of hiding your own links from search engines doesn’t make sense at any level. While some people may believe it can help, no one has been able to show that any Website has ever benefitted from the practice. Worse yet, Google has already made it clear that these kinds of cheap tricks only hurt the sites that use them.