Hello JavaScript Spidering and Goodbye PageRank Sculpting – SEO News
By Keith | June 3rd, 2009
Google drops a bomb on how PageRank works!
The biggest news to hit the SEO community yesterday was Matt Cutts of Google announcing at SMX Advanced that using the NoFollow microformat for PageRank sculpting doesn’t quite work as everyone thought. Apparently, PageRank distributes the same amount of PR to a page, despite how many other pages are nofollowed. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan explains:
“If you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.”
For the uninitiated, PageRank sculpting is an advanced SEO technique designed to push PR to specific pages on a website, usually the top converting pages. There have been many debates in the SEO sphere whether this is a useful or necessary technique, because if implemented improperly, it can choke and hamper a site’s deeper pages. I’ve seen many ill-conceived attempts at PR sculpting, and in one hilarious instance, a site that NoFollowed every page except the login area (FYI, robots don’t sign up for user accounts).
Personally, I’m of the belief that a better technique is to focus your energy on improving the conversion paths on ALL of a site’s pages (adage: “Every page is the homepage”), as opposed to trying to push PR around with NoFollows, but I feel there is value to keeping spiders away from login pages and the like.
The other big news is Google announced the ability to spider JavaScript “onClick” events and indexes those links. So, if you’ve been hiding your paid links with JavaScript, now’s the time to slap a NoFollow on that link!
Tags: search engine optimization, SEO
