Page Rank Scultping

I received my first copy of Website magazine in the mail this weekend. So far it looks to be a most interesting read. My favorite article from this issue was “Google Pagerank Sculpting for SEO Profit” by Dante A. Monteverde. This was an informative article since I had never heard the term Pagerank sculpting before.
Sculpting is the practice of using the rel-nofollow attribute on links. You control which outbound links provide link juice, and which do not. This was invented by Matt Cutts of Google. It was initially in response to spammers posting links in comments. Systems that automatically use nofollow on comment links prevent any value from being passed on through such a link.

It is not only Google that will honor nofollow. Yahoo and MSN do the same. You could be more hard core and employ a robot.txt file to prevent crawlers from reading your links. However on some sites you want to link out and make it count, while on the same site you might want to do a little sculpting. Nofollow gives you this fine control over the passing of link juice.

I normally deal with the loss of link juice by not linking out to other sites other than my own. In rare circumstances I do link to worthy sites. However with nofollow, I can link away and still prevent the link juice from spilling out of my page and onto other sites. It is just one extra attribute to add onto the HTML link reference. I might try this out. The only time I will not use this is if I want to keep my viewers on my page. But that is another story.

Directory Submission

I created a couple new web sites last week. And I wanted to get them indexed by Google quickly. So I started with a tried and true method. I linked to them from an existing web site I control. However I wanted to do a little bit more to get these sites on the Google radar. So I went ahead and submitted them to some web directories.

The priority of which directories I submit to is based on the page rank of the directories. The first stop is always the Open Directory Project (aka DMOZ). This directory is a monster page rank 8. The rest of the directories I target are almost all page rank 5. Some of these are more difficult to submit to than others. For example, some of them try to confuse you to get you to click their Google AdSense ads. However some of them are very easy to submit to. One really simple directory to use if InfoTiger.

Most of the time, the submissions just put my requests in a queue for review. At some time in the future a human or an automated process reviews my requests and acts upon it if I pass their guidelines. I found two directories to be very fast at accepting and posting my requests in their directories. These fast response directories are Search Sight and Jaborwhalky. For fast results I recommend them.

It is a painful and time consuming process to manually submit my new URLs to directories. I wish this process could be automated for me. I have seen some software to do this in the past. However I am not sure how good that software is. I would hate to have an automated program mess up my directory submissions. Perhaps I need to do some more research on the offerings in this area. More likely I will have to roll my own program. I am a developer after all. But that will take some time.

Link Exchange

I received an unsolicited e-mail yesterday. It asked “can we exchanged (sic) links?” Then it provided the URL they wanted promoted. A hotmail return e-mail address was supplied. I checked the web site they wanted promoted. It had 451 inbound links to it. It also had a Google Page Rank 2. So I thought about this proposition and the value it would provide to me.

The first thing that was sketchy was that they were spamming me. They did not address me by name. They also did not give me their name. Also they only had a hotmail account. That does not mean they are evil. However they do not have e-mail, or will not give out their e-mail from their own domain. And the final straw was that their email was not grammatically correct. So perhaps English is not their first language. Still that made the request seem a bit shady.

Google does not like link exchanges in general I think. So I would not want to do anything that would penalize me in terms of page rank. The page they wanted to exchange was only a page rank 2. It also linked out to a lot of other sites. So they would not be able to provide much extra link juice for my site.

I guess I could respond with a test URL of my own. Then I could tell them to link to me first, and I would reciprocate. That way I could ensure this was not a one way deal. I could also analyze the effect on my test web page. Hey. It might be worth a try. However I suspect this would either have negligible or even negative effects in the end. You can’t fault somebody for trying to gain inbound links. To sign me up you need to perfect your pitch.