Beware Advice from Bad SEOs
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010There is a popular idea circulating among the search engine optimization community that has been debunked by the leading experts in the field, including Google employees. This idea has led many Websites to harm their search engine indexing and visibility. The concept is called PageRank Sculpting and it is based on the erroneous belief that you can somehow improve your site’s search engine results by hiding internal links on your site from search engines.
Despite having been shown to be ineffective by Google itself, people who believe in PageRank Sculpting continue to promote this very dangerous practice because they have invested so much time and energy in it that they cannot let go of the idea. Make no mistake: attempting to sculpt PageRank in your Website is a very high-risk, low-benefit proposition. The primary reason PageRank sculpting fails is that there is no reliable way of tracking or measuring the PageRank that Google assigns to your Web pages.
What most people don’t realize is that Google calculates its PageRank many times throughout the year but it only updates its toolbar PageRank data a few times a year. Many Webmasters wrongly conclude that if the PR value in the toolbar changes they must have made some difference. Especially now with faster indexing for real-time search, Google’s search results are in a constant state of flux. SEOs who believe in PageRank sculpting make no effort to allow for the changes that are caused by other factors in spite of their bad practices.
PageRank sculpting has been challenged and shown to be a false idea by leading figures in the search optimization industry like Matt Cutts (a Google employee), Shari Thurow, Adam Audette, Adam Lasnik (another Google employee), and others. If someone tries to teach you how to sculpt PageRank you should ignore their advice. But if you have already tried to sculpt your PageRank you should undo the changes you have made and fix your Website.