PageRank Sculpting

webmasters have the option of controlling the flow of PageRank throughout their site by using a little attribute called 'nofollow' in their anchor tags. it looks something like this:

the addition of the rel="nofollow" piece tells the search engine spiders not to pass link juice (PageRank) to the landing page that the hyperlink is pointing to. this is a common practice for bloggers who want to protect their site posts from spam commenters who post comments strictly for trying to get a live link that points to whatever page or site they want to promote.

so these days, most blogs have the nofollow attribute on all their site post comments.

but for controlling PageRank flow within your own site, this is a great tactic for concentrating more link juice to the "important" pages of your site and cutting off PageRank to the less important pages.

for example, do you really need/want PageRank to accumulate on your "Contact Us" page or your "Terms of Use / Privacy Policy" page? i don't. i could care less if these pages rank for anything or even show up in the index for that matter. so i turn off the passing of PageRank to these pages as they really just aren't important.

or if you have links to external websites and you don't want to give away your PageRank, throw the nofollow attribute on your link and the end-user will still get the benefit of seeing/following a link if they want but you are not giving away your link juice.

a quick tip for those of you not in the know.