Michael: Sasquatch and the Chupacabra are both myths but there are people who claim to have seen both. Until we have clear scientific evidence of their existence, we can only say that it’s possible such creatures have existed and perhaps may exist in some remote corner of the wilderness.

As far as PageRank sculpting goes, no one is actually capable of doing it so it’s not a viable optimization strategy. Until it becomes a viable optimization strategy, anyone who advocates sculpting PageRank is giving out bad, unusable advice.

And as Rand Fishkin demonstrated, you’re more likely to hurt yourself than to do nothing at all so the risks are not acceptable.

Show me someone who actually sculpts PageRank and I’ll be glad to look at what they’ve done. I’m as interested in learning from others as I’ve always been, but I’m not buying the B.S. that is being peddled by a couple of people out there.

Anyone is welcome to put up or shut up on this topic as far as I’m concerned.

A far better technique is handcoding individual txt documents for each specific robot and placing them in your root folder. This technique is a welcome mat for SE robots and other similar crawlers that in my experience will guarantee a much higher overall page rank than the tips in this post by Michael Martinez.

Michael: I think Matt is clearly encouraging the SEO community to play with PageRank sculpting, knowing fully well they can’t do it properly.

But what do you think of Matt’s followup to Rand on SEOmoz itself, where Rand went way over the top with his interpretation of Matt’s interview answers?

What do you think of Rand’s own admissions that he screwed up the indexing of more than one site when he tried to implement his own advice?

What do you think of the idea of people not just saying, “Hey! Wow! Great post!” but instead actually TESTING the ideas that are thrown out on SEO blogs before saying anything?

Stopping to test could keep a lot of people from making embarrassing remarks and commitments to clients and employers.

“We did an interview with Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz where we talked about the fact that NoFollow was a perfectly acceptable tool to use in addition to robots.txt. NoIndex and NoFollow as a metatag can change how Googlebot crawls your site. It’s important to realize that typically these things are more of a second order effect. What matters the most is to have a great site and to make sure that people know about it, but, once you have a certain amount of PageRank, these tools let you choose how to develop PageRank amongst your pages.”
http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts.shtml

I’ve found that in some cases nofollow is a great way to manage pr flow when you’re dealing with a client site that can’t or won’t be modified to manage the flow without nofollow. For example, a client site that links to search results in it’s navigation and due to a CMS being used, can’t easily be changed. In a case like that, using nofollow, while not a perfect solution, is better than doing nothing.

But PageRank flow is not what people in the SEO community are thinking about.

I see your point and I have to take your word for it. You know the people in the SEO community a lot more than I do.