SEO Nonsense - Sculpting PageRank Builds Muscle

I see that certain voices are once again advocating the idiocy of managing PageRank through the use of “rel=’nofollow’”.

I could compose yet another long-winded argument debunking the nonsense but I’ve already done that more than once. So, while it’s true there are plenty of gullible people in the SEO community who run around from blog to blog saying “Wow! Great post!” in response to whatever crap has been shared by people who should have gotten a clue by now, I think it’s also pretty obvious that most of those people don’t actually implement everything they compliment.

There are no unimportant or “boring” pages on a Web site. That includes “About Us”, “Terms of Service”, and “Contact Us” pages — all of which are used by people in different capacities. Your “Contact Us” page — if you have designed it properly — will be picked up by several Local/Map search services. Assuming you’re not stupid enough to block them from getting to it through robots.txt or use of “rel=’nofollow’”.

The average SEO cannot gain any substantial benefit from using “rel=’nofollow’” that would not be achieved more easily through good internal navigation. If you learn how to design internal site navigation properly, you don’t need to compensate for SEO incompetence by blocking out your incidental pages through “rel=’nofollow’”.

There is absolutely no one in the SEO community today who is capable of executing such a strategy competently, which fact is plainly evident from the recent admission by one foot-shooting advocate who confessed on his blog that he didn’t get it right in his experiments.

Before you start telling someone they’ve written a great, informative post, you should stop to consider if they actually shared anything worth knowing.

Generally speaking, the more pages you get into the Main Web Index, the more search visibility you get from Google. So before you start diminishing pages’ chances of getting into the Main Web Index, ask yourself just how much internal PageRank a page needs to be admitted.

Do you recall that internal PageRank is not reported by Google? It’s not a number between 1 and 10, according to the technical literature that is publicly accessible on the Web. Where do you think NoFollowers are getting their PageRank information from?

Do you know how often Google actually updates the Internal PageRank for each page on your site? Is it every time they fetch one of your pages? Is it once a month? Is it twice a year? If you don’t know how often your Internal PageRank is adjusted, then how can you possibly hope to measure the effectiveness of your strategy to “sculpt PageRank flow” through your site?

You’re working with no data. You’re making up numbers and plugging them into a nonsense formula. That’s the Dr. Seuss SEO method (and I offer my sincerest apologies to the good Dr. but while his books were entertaining they were not very informative about much of anything in the real world).

If you want to “sculpt” PageRank flow, you need to focus more on where you want it to go and less on where you don’t want it to go. Give the search engines as many usable links as you can. Your site will pass all of its PageRank to other sites regardless of what you do. Your site will also flow its PageRank internally regardless of what you do. It’s not like you can actually set up a barrier and say, “PageRank does not go beyond this point!” Even if you could do that, all you would do is screw up your site’s ability to show its most relevant results in Google’s queries.

And there are other search engines out there that send people traffic. Those search engines don’t treat Web content the same way Google does. You get better results from Yahoo! than from Google. Even Microsoft does a better job at site search than Google. Why is that?

The real issue that people are fumbling with is how to get more pages to show up in Google queries. It’s as simple as that. You can use the SEO Slow Start method to get your “most important pages” indexed but your objective should be to get all of your pages indexed in Google’s Main Web Index.

Why settle for less than that?

When your Web site is a hoary old archive filled with dated material you can afford to let the older content slide into the Supplemental Results Index. People who want to find that stuff will look a little deeper through highly specific queries and on multiple search engines.

If, however, your Web site is fresh, current, and full of relevant information on one or more topics, you don’t need to be tap-dancing around the PageRank Fools Club. You need to be sure your site design gets people to the content they are looking for as quickly as possible. Strong internal linkage works better for you than weak broken linkage.

If you build a 30-page Web site, there is absolutely no reason why you cannot get at least three links pointing to every page on the site. And that’s just using very low-key, mildly optimized internal navigation. It doesn’t incorporate cross-promotional margin links, embedded copy links, or other special linking features that might boost your internal linkage. That’s just using very plain, simple, low-impact site navigation.

Have you designed a 30-page site that directs at least three links at every page? If not, why not? It should take you no more than a day to create such a site. All you have to do is set it up on your server, on your PC, or on a deck of cards. You don’t have to worry about what the content is about, where it comes from, or how long it will take to get the site indexed.

Just design a site that has strong internal navigation.

And when you’ve developed your “Three Links Technique” enough that you can do it in your sleep, create a “Four Links Technique” that ensures you can point at least four internal links to every page without cramming them into footers and margins and looking like a spammer’s nightmare.

The only real difference between competent SEO and incompetent SEO is the amount of effort you put into doing the work right the first time versus the amount of effort you put into fixing your screwups. If you reach a point where using “rel=’nofollow’” looks like it mght help your site, you’re not doing it right.

“rel=’nofollow’” is the last resort of an incompetent SEO. It is never a requirement for any competent site optimizer.

Until you know how to measure Google’s internal PageRank, you don’t need to be worrying about how to sculpt it. You cannot sculpt PageRank without being able to measure it.

You do need to know enough about PageRank to understand that if you don’t have enough your page goes into the Supplemental Results Index and that it will be passed over in favor of less relevant content that made it into the Main Web Index.

You do need to know that each site “gets only so much PageRank” (as Matt Cutts put it at SMX Advanced 2007) and that if you have a lot of pages you need to get more PageRank to ensure your site has enough internal PageRank to get into the Main Web Index.

“rel=’nofollow’” is not a substitute for PageRank. Nor does “rel=’nofollow’” stretch PageRank or make it go farther than it can. Your pages pass the PageRank around to each other just like they pass it around to other pages, but eventually all your conferable PageRank leaves your site despite everything you do. You cannot prevent “leakage”. You don’t lose any PageRank just because you link out to another site, but you might be depriving yourself of the ability to get all your pages included.

If you’re really worried about where the PageRank flows, then don’t link out from your high-tier pages. Just have them link deeper into your site. That is, don’t put any links on your root URL to other domains. Don’t put any links on your section root URLs to other domains. Only link out to other domains from leaf nodes.

Assume your site will confer all the PageRank it has to share and then decide from whence that PageRank should flow. Send your links down to the leaf nodes in such a way that you get more than one internal link to every page. Spread your outbound links across as many leaf pages as possible (but keep in mind that these leaves should be linking to each other as well as other pages on your site).

There is no law that says a page should have no outbound links. In fact, if you want to formalize the principles fo good search engine optimization into “laws”, then the First Law of Search Engine Optimization should read: Every page on a Web site must link to at least 2 other pages on the same site. Which two pages would you choose?

The First Law of SEO ensures that you don’t isolate your content. It also ensures that every page gets PageRank. What it cannot do is ensure that any page will get sufficient PageRank to be included in Google’s Main Web Index. But then, neither will using “rel=’nofollow’” ensure that any more pages get into the Main Web Index. After all, you still don’t know how much Internal PageRank you actually need to accomplish that little trick.

The Second Law of Search Engine Optimization should read: Every page on a Web site is relevant to that site. You cannot have a page that is irrelevant to your site. You may have some pages you hope no one finds but they are all relevant to your site.

But what is the significance of that law? Could it be that every page really is important to a Web site? Why should that be? Is it because every page can act like a doorway, bringing new visitors to your site who would not have found it otherwise? Is it because every page can host 1 or more links to other pages on your site, helping to show the search engines (and your visitors) which pages are the most important pages? Is it because you get just a little smidgeon of PageRank for each page simply because PageRank has to come from somewhere?

Given a choice between 1,000 pages (of which only 100 make it into Google’s Main Web Index) and 50 pages (of which only 25 make it into Google’s Main Web Index), which site would you want to control? That’s not really a trick question. You get to decide which content to put on those 1,000 (or 50) pages. You get to decide what they link to.

So, which would you prefer? Me, I’ll take the 1,000 with the 100 performing pages over a 50-page site that has a better Main-Web-Index-to-Supplemental Ratio any day of the week. The percentage of pages from a site that are non-Supplemental is not nearly as importnt as the number of pages that are non-Supplemental.

After all, every additional page in the Main Web Index is another opportunity to draw in relevant, interested traffic.

You need to focus your efforts on getting pages INTO the Main Web Index, not keeping them out. You need to think in terms of building links TO PAGES, not in terms of restricting link flow. You need to think in terms of how easy it is for people (and search engines) to move around your site, not how you can impede movement.

You need to think about where you want to create visibility, not where you want to create INvisibility. A spring cannot send forth both bitter water and sweet. You’re not optimizing for search if you’re setting boundaries for search engines.

You either optimize your site or you shrink your site. You cannot have it both ways. Just be sure you can live with the worst possible results of your experimentation before you start carving up your internal linkage after reading 50 “Wow! Great post!” comments on some blog.