Another great swing in the pendulum! Google has made yet another shift in its algorithms, and this time it’s about Page Rank sculpting using nofollow tag. What is Page Rank sculpting? Page Rank sculpting is an enhanced SEO technique, by which the Webmaster’s and SEO’s can control how Page Rank flows within the side using nofollow tag. In simple words, you could extend more links to more important pages, without injuring a certain page’s rank—but gone are the days!

The leader of Google's Web spam team says “no more Page Rank sculpting using nofollow”. This may be a big blow for SEO community out there, not only because a change has been made but because this change was made a year back and is being disclosed now.

Although a rough explanation by Matt Cutts was intended to clear it all when he said, “At first, we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice, but they didn’t. In retrospect, we’ve changed other, larger aspects of how we look at links and people didn’t notice that either, so perhaps that shouldn’t have been such a surprise.” This explanation
sure is not a surprise as Cutts terms it, but an utter shock!

Let’s see how this new change can affect the Page Rank of your website. Consider you have a page with ten outgoing links and five of those links are nofollowed. For each link you get one point which means you have 10 Page Rank points in total. With PageRank sculpting, you were able to put nofollow on 5 out of 10 links by which the nofollowed links were not counted by Google and the remaining 5 links got 2 points each, making them rank higher.

Things have however changed now, a certain 10 links page may still have 10 points with 5 nofollow links…but now, the nofollow links will not be ignored by Google and the Page Rank will be segregated equally. Means, instead of 2 points, the regular links will get 1 point each and the nofollow links will get no points at all, though the nofollow links will consume their points but will not send them forward.

The question that arises at present is whether Page Rank sculpting using nofollow a bad plan or not? Well, Cutts sure has answered this by saying,

“I wouldn’t recommend it, because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your Page Rank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “Page Rank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawl able for humans and search engines alike.”

At this point I would suggest not to panic if you have utilized the nofollow tags on your website, and don’t go all removing them particularly if it’s applied on the paid links. After all, this changed occurred a year back, and if none of the SEO’s figured it out during this long period, then it certainly proves little harm. Although Google and all its policy makers should be condemned for hiding this aspect from its users and optimizers, because no matter how slight and insignificant the change is, it may still have affected many!

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