Yet another Sphinn-winning blog has posted a ridiculous attempt to justify the use of rel=nofollow on internal links. The “buckets with holes” metaphor has become popular among Nofollowers trying to explain why you should shoot yourself in the foot with rel=nofollow.
Put simply, nofollow tells Google not to crawl a link. Telling Google not to crawl a link is equivalent to saying, “Please take this page out of the Main Web Index”. You may have to use nofollow on several inbound links to get your “Contact Michael Martinez” page out of the Main Web Index.
Eventually, you’re going to succeed in stripping your “Contact Michael Martinez” page of its internal PageRank and then you’ll find other people’s “Contact Michael Martinez” pages ranking above yours — including those much-dreaded Ripoff Report pages, and other sites who may be telling you to “Contact Michael Martinez to tell him what a jerk he is for pointing out just how stupid search engine optimizers who like to ’sculpt PageRank’ can really be”.
Stripping your own content of PageRank only devalues it. Stripping your own content of PageRank doesn’t tell the search engines to crawl and index your other pages more often. Stripping your own content of PageRank only allows your competition to get more pages into the Google Main Web Index.
It takes a complete and total moron to try to rationalize the idea of concentrating all of a site’s internal PageRank in a smaller number of pages. It takes a completely incompetent ass to try to sell the idea to anyone that you can successfully sculpt your PageRank.
You cannot sculpt PageRank until you can see it. Which part of you don’t know which of your pages has PageRank does the SEO community not get? There is no real-time reporting for PageRank. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
You don’t know where your PageRank is assigned, I don’t know, Matt Cutts doesn’t know without checking one of his special tools, and you be sure as ship-high-in-transit that none of our PageRank-sculpting SEOs have a clue as to what they are doing.
Leave PageRank sculpting to idiots who don’t have time to learn about real search engine optimization. Let them pat each other on the back and say “Great post” and leave them to sit in the dark with their unlit, wickless candles.
Until they can get a tool that tells them where the PageRank is and is flowing, the only things with holes are their heads and their stupid, clumsy, unprofessional ideas about sculpting PageRank.
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
randyray 03.05.08 at 7:45 am
Great post! I’d like to pat you on the back for this one…
joepreston 03.05.08 at 8:12 am
ah, but Matt Cutts approves
which begs the question: how the devil can he approve of this? There is no purpose to “pagerank sculpting” except to manipulate search engine rankings!
From Google Guidelines for Webmasters Whose Name Does Not Rhyme w/ Fand Rishkin:
“Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
Michael Martinez 03.05.08 at 8:49 am
I would not say that Matt Cutts approves so much as Rand Fishkin made it look like Matt Cutts approved (since Matt came back in the comments and restated his position):
If someone is complaining about their Contact Us page being recrawled and reindexed frequently, they obviously don’t know what is going on in the search engine. That page would be a perfect link warehouse. Stripping it of its ability to push crawlers toward new content on a frequent basis is about as stupid an idea as the SEO community has ever come up with.
mike_peak 03.06.08 at 7:00 am
Okay so I am pretty new to seo and I read a post about nofollowing internal links and went ahead and tried it. I understand it is not very clever to remove all links to a page like ‘contact us’, but say you have 20,000 internal links to that page and you take out 10,000 – would that be a bad thing to do?
Michael Martinez 03.06.08 at 8:45 am
mike_peak: “…say you have 20,000 internal links to that page and you take out 10,000 – would that be a bad thing to do?”
Michael: There is nothing smart about doing that but it doesn’t necessarily hurt you, unless you’re trying to leverage your PageRank. After all, with 20,000 inbound links that page should be crawled and reindexed frequently. That makes it a great resource for highlighting important content on your site and sending search engines (as well as people) to it. So, if you don’t mind cutting the strength of that page in half so that it serves your interests less — no, it’s not a bad thing at all.
But there is no good reason to deprive a page of half its inbound links. After all, you’re not ADDING links to other pages on your site so they won’t be crawled and reindexed any faster than before. If the average Web page has 20 outbound (but internal) links on it, removing 1 link leaves 19 behind. That doesn’t do a whole lot for boosting that page’s ability to push PageRank.
But if you put some links on your “Contact Us” page, well, with 20,000 inbound links it has the power to do something useful for you.
That’s how you leverage your PageRank. Let it flow where it will and then use it.
incrediblehelp 03.14.08 at 7:19 am
So funny:
“and other sites who may be telling you to “Contact Michael Martinez to tell him what a jerk he is for pointing out just how stupid search engine optimizers who like to ’sculpt PageRank’ can really beâ€.’
GREAT POST, pat on the back for your Micheal for being strong and continuing to post the obvious when some many others are tripping over themselves to get this implemented on their websites.
bihonline 03.14.08 at 8:16 am
…ridiculous attempt to justify…
…shoot yourself in the foot…
…how stupid search engine optimizers who like to ’sculpt PageRank’ can really be…
…It takes a complete and total moron to try to rationalize the idea…
…It takes a completely incompetent ass…
…Leave PageRank sculpting to idiots…
…leave them to sit in the dark…
…the only things with holes are their heads and their stupid, clumsy, unprofessional ideas about sculpting PageRank.
uhm… great post… for some, I guess.
Rel=”nofollow” on selected internal links helps a lot, if you know what you’re doing.
It doesn’t really matter whether that has anything to do with PageRank or not.
Michael Martinez 03.14.08 at 9:07 am
bihonline: “Rel=â€nofollow†on selected internal links helps a lot, if you know what you’re doing.”
Michael: Well, I’ve yet to find anyone who actually knows how to do it. In fact, I’ve yet to find anyone who can actually make a coherent, logical argument in favor of NOT linking to content that has been placed on a Web site.
incrediblehelp 03.15.08 at 12:02 pm
@bihonline
1. Tell me why you dont want content on your website index.
2. Then show me evidence that if you do block your content that it helps your other content rank better.
Kaus 03.15.08 at 10:07 pm
Awesome post! Someone pointed me to your site a couple months ago and it is an absolute gem…nice work
semmaster 03.27.08 at 5:38 am
Don’t look at it as trying to pass PR. Look at it as not getting unimportant pages indexed. You don’t need printer-friendly pages indexed, do you? Yes, I know there are other ways of doing that through coding, but simply adding a nofollow tag can do the trick.
Michael Martinez 03.27.08 at 6:55 am
The best way to not get an unimportant page indexed is to not put it on your Web site.
Justin-Goldberg 02.09.09 at 10:29 pm
Think about how can one make the contact page useful when linking out from it. I’m brainstorming as we speak.
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