Faux Science of Pagerank Sculpting Must Be Questioned
February 14th, 2010The search engine optimization industry received a serious failing grade in 2009 when Google announced that it had taken measures to undermine a popular though controversial SEO technique. Known as Pagerank sculpting, this technique first appeared on SEO blogs in mid-2007 after Google engineer Matt Cutts mentioned that Pagerank could be spread across Websites like peanut butter at an industry conference. Taking that idea too far, Pagerank sculpting SEO writers suggested that Websites could sacrifice the Pagerank being assigned to less important pages for the purpose of increasing Pagerank for other pages.
By using the hotly debated “rel=’nofollow’” link attribute to hide links from Google’s and other search engines crawlers, Pagerank sculpting was supposed to solve problems that were otherwise too complex for some SEOs. Pages like “About Us”, “Terms of Service”, and “Privacy Policy” were outranking some clients’ home pages. The best course of action these SEOs argued was to devalue those pages and make it less like the search engines would find and crawl them.
Pagerank sculpting was not immediately popular, and some of the more well-respected members of the industry like Shari Thurow and Michael Martinez wrote thoughtful rebuttals of the technique. However the people who stood behind Pagerank sculpting claimed they had tests and studies which showed that Pagerank sculpting worked. In fact, Google confirmed in 2009 that those tests and studies — never fully disclosed to the industry — had failed to reveal a significant change Google made soon after Pagerank sculpting began.
Google engineers saw almost immediately that Websites attempting to sculpt Pagerank were losing search listings. To resolve this issue and discourage SEOs from supporting the bad idea, Google change how it assigns Pagerank to pages. Now the Pagerank that would be preserved by using “rel=’nofollow’” is dispersed to all other pages equally. Google’s counter-Pagerank sculpting helped ensure that pages would return to its index.
When Google engineer Matt Cutts explained why the search engine took this extraordinary step on his blog, he said that Pagerank sculpting SEO writers who mentioned tests had failed to notice any change in how their client sites were being indexed. Since the Pagerank sculpting SEO community was unaware of how Pagerank was flowing through client sites, Google felt it was necessary to take some action.
The revelation that all the tests and studies supporting Pagerank sculpting were faux science did not go unnoticed. Some people who had supported Pagerank sculpting denounced the practice as a complete waste of time. Some long-time PR sculpting foes gloated over being right. But some Pagerank sculpting advocates have fought back, proposing new methods for hiding site navigation from search engines.
Business site operators should be questioning the value of the SEO advice that Pagerank sculpting advocates offer. Since they harmed Website search listings before, how well will their new ideas work now?