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.
