Smokend Info Blog

Every profession has its controversies and differences of opinion. The search engine optimization industry veritably explodes with differences of opinion on a regular basis. This week however a harshly worded message has been published by one of the most respected names in the business. Writing for the Best SEO Blog, SEO Theorist Michael Martinez says that “Goodhat SEOs must disavow PageRank sculpting”. In other words, only incompetent SEOs and scam artists would advise anyone to sculpt PageRank on a Website, Martinez suggests. Why is that?

The debate over PageRank sculpting erupted a few years ago after Google revealed that it had used the “rel=’nofollow’” link attribute to prevent PageRank from flowing to user-submitted videos on the popular YouTube site. The videos scroll across the front page of YouTube so quickly that any links Googlebot finds would pass immense value to inner content pages that might never become popular.

Some people in the SEO community, when asked by clients to fix sites where the wrong pages were appearing in search results, concluded that Google’s trick would work for their clients. The idea caught on quickly with popular SEO bloggers like Dan Thies, Rand Fishkin, Stephen Spencer, and others. However, despite the claims that PageRank sculpting proponents made about their successful efforts, skeptics lined up against them, including Vanessa Fox (a former Google employee), Michael Martinez, Shari Thurow, Adam Audette, and others. Demanding proof that PageRank sculpting works and receiving none, these and other conservative SEOs declared PR sculpting to be foolish nonsense.

As the fallout from the debate spread across the SEO community, other PageRank sculpting articles appeared, attempting to present both sides of the argument. Some of these PageRank sculpting articles were not only skeptical, they asked bluntly: “Was there genuine value in using nofollow for PR sculpting anyway?”

Over the summer of 2009 Google employee Matt Cutts announced that Google had derailed the whole PR sculpting process more than a year previously because Websites attempting to sculpt PageRank were removing important content from Google’s index. The rationale was very clear and simple: sculpting PageRank hurt your Website’s visibility. Google employees at first expected SEOs to detect the problem and reverse the trend, but all the SEOs who ran PageRank sculpting tests failed to notice the elephant in the living room.

And yet since then the PageRank sculpting forces have rallied around new methods for blocking crawlers from inner pages on Websites. Hence, Michael Martinez has thrown down the gauntlet. After demanding proof that PageRank sculpting works many times, he has changed his response. Now he is simply shredding the credibility of anyone who practices or teaches PageRank sculpting. This is one critic the SEO community cannot afford to ignore.

Comments Off