The latest buzz in the world of Search Engine Optimization is a technique less informed SEO’s are using in an attempt to push Google PageRank™ (also called Link Juice) to specific pages on a website, a technique known as PageRank Sculping. However, during his keynote at SMX Advance 2009, Matt Cutts clarified that the technique does not make any difference to Google PageRank™.

How PageRank™ Sculpting Works

Every link on every page of a website has a value or “voting power”. Sculpting links to have more or less voting power could result in higher PageRank for keyword-emphasized pages. Google has made it clear that you should not link outside of your website to 3rd party web pages that you don’t trust using a “nofollow” attribute in your anchor tag. Recently, SEO’s somehow came up with the idea that you share less PageRank™ with internal pages by using the same technique. Basically, you’d use a nofollow attribute for non-keyword rich pages, thereby giving more voting power to the links without the nofollow.

Matt Cutts: “Don’t Waste Your Time” to Sculpting

According to Matt Cutts, however, this is not the case. Cutts demystified the idea of PageRank™ Sculpting by stating that “nofollowing a link does not give more weight to the other links on a page” and that “the PageRank™ of the nofollowed link simply goes away”.

The argument during the keynote had to do with YouTube.com using the nofollow attribute to random video pages from their homepage. Cutts actually had knowledge of this and stated that that YouTube did this to simple prevent random pages from getting enormous amount of PageRank™ from the homepage, not to push more votes to subsequent pages.

SEO Vets Have Different Opinions

The SEO Vets at the MEGA Session (SMX Advanced 2009) all shared their thoughts on the topic in the video above, stating that are circumstances where they would still use the technique, but in most cases nobody has seen a difference in search engine ranking.

If you have tried this technique and seen any significant results, definitely share your story below.