17 Jun 2009

Google engineer Matt Cutts has attempted to clarify the issue of PageRank sculpting for search engine optimisation (SEO) purposes following comments he made at the recent SMX Advanced event.

The conference saw Mr Cutts reveal that Google had changed the way it dealt with PageRank going out to linked sites when some of the links on the same page had the 'nofollow' attribute assigned to them.

Previously, SEO executives had engaged in PageRank sculpting by using nofollow to control which of their website pages received PageRank from the original page.

However, in a blog post published yesterday (June 15th), Mr Cutts said that not all of a page's PageRank is divided equally between outgoing links when nofollow is used and urged marketers to avoid focusing on sculpting at the expense of creating a sound user experience.

"The first-order things to pay attention to are making great content that will attract links in the first place and choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike," he remarked.

Mr Cutts had said at SMX Advanced that PageRank that goes unused due to the use of nofollow can be said to be "just evaporating", according to WebProNews.

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