Posted on Monday, 6th July 2009 by admin
Before you start commenting that I am behind times and PR sculpting is dead; let me tell you it’s not dead. The two popular methods to sculpt PR are dead and we are back to 2002-2003 when these methods were not being used. The are the two dead methods I am talking about:
- Nofollowing links that you didn’t want PR to flow to
- Using dynamic javascript links
As we have already heard that nofollowing links won’t work as well as it used to do earlier, does that still prevent me from nofollowing my privacy / disclaimer page? It shouldn’t. I will still advice people to work on internal PR flow but they should do it keeping in mind that it’s not as effective as it used to be 2 years ago.
Coming back to new or rather old methods for PR scultping; the one method that most SEOs used earlier before they got into more fancy stuff, it still works but require more thinking and efforts.
Minimize number of outbound links on your pages
It works specially well for directories because a directory’s homepage will typically have many links to internal categories. As an average 10+ categories (sometimes 15+) are listed on main page and 3 to 5 subcategories are also linked from first page taking the count to anywhere between 50 to 75 links. This could be easily reduced to 10-15 links by removing links from subcategory. It will result in your main categories getting a PR.
You want to see a proof? My directory WebLinksToday.com has a PR2 on the homepage and following categories have PR1 with 0 or a couple of direct inbound links:
http://www.weblinkstoday.com/Recreation_and_Sports/
http://www.weblinkstoday.com/Computers_and_Internet/
http://www.weblinkstoday.com/Education/
http://www.weblinkstoday.com/Health/
Who said getting PR on internal pages / categories is difficult, with the right approach it’s possible. I plan to get some backlinks for my internal categories pages soon.
In the meanwhile, keep in mind: PR sculpting is not dead
Tags: directories, internal links, PR sculpting
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (5)
July 8th, 2009 at 7:49 am
I dont think it will be long until G changes it back as the only reason they started the nofollow was for themselfs
As long as you have a good seo designed site and only link to sites in your niche or sites that are strong in good content you should still be fine.
Dont forget this is for all site both big and small so it should not change much in the ways of serp.
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July 8th, 2009 at 8:14 am
@Gabriel: We won’t know for another year after G changes it back
None of the BIG SEOs could find the difference for one full year and most even kept charging 1000s of dollars to their clients for using nofollow on internal links. Just limiting number of outbound links is a proven method and will continue to work till Google gives importance to PR.
July 8th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Thanks for the info dear, but I wouldn’t recommend it, because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PR
In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike 3) create a better press release and last but not least 4) Try to drive traffic more to your side, this can be done in many ways like visiting on other’s blog and comment there or publish your web link in collaboration with some advertisement company
For example, it makes a much bigger difference to make sure that people (and bots) can reach the pages on your site by clicking links than it ever did to sculpt PageRank. If you run an e-commerce site, another example of good site architecture would be putting products front-and-center on your web site vs. burying them deep within your site (Ex:www.homeshop18.com) so that visitors and search engines have to click on many links to get to your products.
There may be a miniscule number of pages (such as links to a shopping cart or to a login page) that I might add nofollow on, just because those pages are different for every user and they aren’t that helpful to show up in search engines. But in general, I wouldn’t recommend PageRank sculpting.
July 22nd, 2009 at 8:11 pm
Interesting ideas indeed! I was actually thinking about comments last night and this morning
July 22nd, 2009 at 8:49 pm
Blog comments can be great, thought not very relevant for directories.