PR Sculpting Now Obsolete: So What? Why You Shouldn’t Worry

So Google apparently hasn’t officially confirmed that yet, but now every SEO on the planet is aware of its decision to ignore PageRank sculpting.

If you used nofollow to change how PR flowed within your site, or even Javascript links, that era of easy optimization may be over.

I always knew it would be discounted one day, it was just a matter of time. This technique was so publicized and so abused that Google had to step in.

So the question is: should we start worrying about how we’re going to sculpt PageRank now? Would it be impossible to obtain the same kind of results without PR sculpting (or at least the methods we used to use)?

The answer is a straight NO. In fact, no SEO needs to worry at all.

Remember back in 2005 when every SEO was using link exchange techniques to build links and increase their PageRank? What happened when Google decided to discount these types of links? Did we all give up our optimization campaigns? Nope, we just learned the new rules of the game, we built better links which lead to better SERPs and better websites (at least outgoing links on a page were more useful to the user than reciprocate links).

Back to PR sculpting: you get the point, it’s not the end of the world. If Google really starts to depreciate it, that means that all webmasters are now on an equal footing.

To beat your competitors, you just need to be smarter. Instead of throwing nofollow tags on your “Contact” of “About Us” page links on your 5 page site (which really was useless and could raise flags easily), you’ll now have to organize links in a more clever way.

Based on your keyword research data, add links to your primary pages from your homepage and other important pages in terms of linking value (or link juice, anchor text value, PR, whatever).

At the end it will be the same, but unlike nofollow or Javascript techniques, that technique is not borderline and is perfectly acceptable by Google.

Every webmaster seemed to be using PR sculpting these days, but not all of them are going to be motivated enough to build better internal links, that’s your chance to beat them if you’re smart enough.