Internet Marketing
Marketing With Out The Fluff

PageRank sculpting is a pretty advanced SEO tactic, and it has been widely used by SEO pros since Google’s Matt Cutts described its use on YouTube, giving the strategy the official green light. At SMX Advanced in Seattle, the same harbinger of Google insider information offered a stunning revelation: Google changed the way it handled link structures intended for sculpting. Coverage of SMX Advanced continues at WebProNews Videos .  Stay with WebProNews for more updates and videos from the event this week. An Explanation of PageRank Sculpting (If you know already, skip to next heading.) PageRank sculpting works for sites that already have a high PageRank and, as a result, have a lot of “juice” to pass around. Webmasters looking to have more control over which pages appear in Google’s search results would thus harness the trust (juice) Google gave their site to boost certain pages they consider important while blocking other unimportant or less useful pages. For example, a webmaster may find that a sign-in page or contact page appears in the search results but a page more useful to the end user digging around the Net doesn’t, perhaps because the Googlebot hasn’t been able to locate it. The webmaster could help “sculpt” different pages’ rankings by adding a nofollow tag on links pointing to unimportant pages while linking to preferred pages. In this sense, PageRank was seen as a finite amount of energy to divvy up among a certain number of pages. If you have 10 liters of PageRank juice to distribute, you could deprive one page of receiving any juice and evenly divide the rest among pages needing a boost. With six links, one is nofollowed, the rest normal, giving the Googlebot directions on where to crawl while passing on two liters of juice per page. Google cleared this practice in 2007 by using it with YouTube. The video site links to random videos from the homepage, and as such, when the Googlebot came by, it would pass on the tremendous amount of juice YouTube carried to those random videos. Google used PageRank sculpting to keep it fair and prevent favoritism of certain videos in the search results. That Was Then, This Is Now Matt Cutts Using the 10 liters of juice model, if a webmaster had ten links, blocks five, then five got two liters and five got none. If the webmaster unblocked five, then the juice was evenly redistributed. It also worked in reverse. If a webmaster had distributed the juice among the ten but decided to dam up five, then the juice would evenly redistribute two liters to the preferred five pages.   But, according to Matt Cutts, in a Q&A moderated by Danny Sullivan at SMX Advanced, that’s all changed. Now, if the webmaster dams up five, that half still receives nothing, but the remaining half remains at one liter each instead of being boosted up to two liters. Now, instead of having a certain amount juice to distribute as a webmaster likes, Google allows only that select pages be deprived of juice. And where does that all that excess PageRank juice go? “You can almost think of it as just evaporating,” said Cutts, and one imagines the number of stomachs turning over at that moment. It’s important to note that Cutts said Google would not penalize a site for PageRank sculpting, but Cutts did suggest the practice wasn’t a great use of a webmaster’s time unless using nofollow for sign-in pages, RSS subscribe links, et cetera.   Highlights From the Cutts Q&A Regarding PageRank Sculpting Cutts on penalties It’s not gonna get you a penalty. You’re not gonna get in trouble or anything. We’re not gonna say "oh all of these internal links are nofollowed" or anything like that. However, it’s not as effective, so it’s definitely a better use of your time to go and make new content. Cutts on sculpting If you’re using nofollow to change how PageRank flows around within your site, it’s almost like a band-aid. It’s better to make your site the way you want PageRank to flow from the beginning, and then it’s good for users, and it’s good for search engines. So how you choose to link within your site is your own business, and I would tell people you can try to sculpt PageRank, but it’s not gonna be as useful. So I would urge people to make new content or think about how to link within your site. Put your best products right up on your root page, and things like that. And that’s gonna be a much better way to "sculpt" PageRank than using nofollow. Cutts on site architecture What we’ve been saying from the beginning is don’t spend as much of your time on the PR sculpting aspect of it. Spend your time making good site architecture so that PageRank just flows wherever you want. That’s why we’ve been saying use it sparingly. Don’t use it for links you can’t vouch for. Don’t use it for user-generated content that you don’t necessarily trust. And this is all up on the HTML documentation page made for rel="nofollow”. Cutts on nofollow use : If you are a power user and there’s a specific page you don’t want like a sign up page or a login page, that’s a fine way to use nofollow. For example if you look at mattcutts.com, the only thing I have nofollow on (I believe) is my subscribe link and that’s because it goes to an RSS feed, which is really not all that useful for the main web index. So for me personally, I tend not to use nofollow on my own internal links Chris Crum provided some notes for this article.

In a Q&A session at SMX Advanced in Seattle, Google’s Matt Cutts talked at length about paid links. He was asked several questions about this. Google recently announced it is now reading javascript and acting upon it. In the past, the advice given out has been if you have paid links, you should either nofollow those paid links or use javascript because Google didn’t read it. When asked about this, Matt says Googlebot has gotten smarter. He notes that Google began changing its messaging on this around 2007-2008 to stop mentioning javascript but to nofollow or do a redirect through a URL which is blocked through robots.txt. Cutts says this a very secure way to do it. Cutts says the interesting thing is that even on the onclick in javascript, the crawl and indexing team has submitted code so that it will respect a rel="nofollow" so you can put a rel="nofollow" attribute on a link that’s running in javascript and in the majority of cases Google will make sure it doesn’t float pagerank even if they’re executing the javascript. He says that if you want to be completely safe, nofollow or link through things that are blocked. Someone then asked Matt how long they have to fix their sites if they didn’t know about this. Cutts reponded by saying that javascript has not been a problem in the vast majority of cases. "If you look at the major ad networks, they tend to be doing redirects through or iframes on things that are blocked out on robots.txt anyway." He does say that Google should probably put up a blog post about it though. A Vanessa Fox article about how javascript is executed and crawled these days was also referenced. Cutts thinks the other search engines are moving in the direction of having more sophisticated bots as well. You may have heard that Google gave away Android phones at its recent developer conferences. This was brought up in comparison to paid links. Cutts basically says that it was not Google’s intent to acquire links, and that the move was more aimed at putting Android phones in the hands of developers to inspire the development of apps. Google doesn’t need paid links itself. He says they don’t even think about getting links as far as their own stuff. Cutts also talked about the Federal Trade Commission’s stance, which basically just looks to see if there is material connection to linking. Are you getting something of monetary value for a link? Contests were also brought up in this light. If you’re making people link to you to get into a contest where they can win a prize, that’s close to money for links. "If you’re doing a contest, don’t make it explicitly your role to try to get links," he says. From this part of the Q&A there seemed to be two main points that Cutts wanted to make clear: 1. There’s a spectrum of how money is involved and there’s a spectrum of how people are trying to manipulate or spam the search engines. The majority of the stuff Google sees is where there is money being paid directly for links. 2. As a webmaster, you can do whatever you want on your site. "It’s your site and it’s your choice," he says. Google also has the right to choose what they want to display in their index. If you are interested in learning about other things Cutts discussed in the Q&A, check out the following articles: – Duplicate Content not an Everyday Problem – How to Avoid Google Penalties with AJAX and display:none – Google ‘Evaporating’ Excess PageRank – Matt Cutts Opens Up About Google Penalties – How Google Handles Google Bowling

Not long ago, another installment of the wacky car race known as the LeMons was held.  Rule-breakers are penalized by being forced to do things like paint Bob Ross landscapes on their hoods and participate in conga lines.  Google’s punishment system isn’t quite as obvious, though, so Matt Cutts discussed the matter at SMX Advanced. Coverage of SMX Advanced continues at WebProNews Videos .  Stay with WebProNews for more updates and videos from the event this week. Cutts started by giving a rather witty answer to the question of “how can you tell if your site is in the penalty box?”  He replied, “One really good way is if it disappears completely from Google.  That’s what we call a leading indicator.” After some laughter subsided, Cutts then shared additional details.  He said, “We make the penalties public where we think it can give the most help.  So if you’re a small mom and pop, and you didn’t even realize (this happens a lot) – I hired a webmaster, and he put some hidden text on the page in 2003, and it was like 3 sentences, and they didn’t know – that’s the sort of thing where you want to tell them [through official channels]. “But if you see a sustained drop in ranks, or if it drops completely out, that’s the sort of thing where . . . there’s lots of forums on the web, including the Google Webmaster Forum, where you can go and ask for some help.” Cutts noted that Google’s employees will often respond with some “very, very blatant hints” about what’s gone wrong on such forums.  And here’s one more important detail: unlike the LeMons judges, Google isn’t trying to toy with anyone.  Cutts said that the only reason all of this isn’t conducted out in the open is because scammers and black hats would use the info to their advantage.

This week, it was announced that Google was making changes to search referral URLs . Basically, where URLs looked like this before: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search They will start looking more like this: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw You can read a bit more about that here . Web technologist Niall Kennedy suggested that this was probably a change being made to better track search actions and shield URL parameters from sites downstream. Alex Chitu at the blog Google Operating System had a different and frankly, more interesting theory , which is that it is a solution for the lack of referral information in a future Ajax interface. Matt Cutts recently explained in the following clip that Google was testing AJAX results on a small number of users to open up potentially faster searching capabilities. Listening to him discuss how this would affect analytics puts the URL changes a little bit more into perspective. Chitu’s theory was confirmed when a Google spokesperson told CNET that this was the reasoning for the referral URL change. "These guys are working hard to make things milliseconds faster. They’re always experimenting," the spokesperson said. In the above video, Cutts says the experiment is only available to less than 1% of Google users. Basically what it does is loads search results without loading the entire page each time a new search is performed. Milliseconds indeed.

Google’s Matt Cutts has posted a video in which he responds to user questions regarding Google’s [link:] search operator. He answers the following two questions: – How accurate is Google’s backlink-check (link:…)? Are all nofollow backlinks filtered out or why does Yahoo/MSN show quite more backlink results? – If you have inbound links from reputable sites, but those sites don’t show up in a link:webname.com search, does this mean you aren’t getting any "credit" in Google’s eyes for having inbound links? The video comes from Google Webmaster Central’s YouTube channel , which is full of useful videos for webmasters. The channel has videos not only from Cutts, but from other knowledgeable Googlers as well. Cutts himself has been posting informative videos on his own in an effort to bring his presentations from various conferences to the audience at home.