PageRank Sculpting and Your Arizona SEO Campaign

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With the recent SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, many webmasters and SEO specialists are up in arms about the announcement made by Matt Cutts of Google, indicating that PageRank sculpting techniques are not nearly as effective as they once were. In essence, Google is again modifying the way it evaluates websites and issues PageRank. Find out what this news means for your Phoenix business and how those changes should reflect on your Arizona SEO campaign.

What Is PageRank Sculpting?

PageRank sculpting is the practice of influencing which links and webpages Google pays attention to while evaluating your website. Google offered best practices guidelines on the issue back in 1998, detailing the manner in which your Phoenix SEO company might help your site establish relevance and increase PageRank.

The most common method of page sculpting that your Arizona SEO firm may have implemented is the act of placing the rel="nofollow" tag on certain links, as a means of directing the flow of link juice on your website. This is an especially useful technique for avoiding the negative effect of things like spammy blog comments and other irrelevant links, all of which have the potential to penalize your site.
In some cases, your Phoenix SEO company could not only downplay questionable links, but also place emphasis on your most valuable links. For example, if you placed six inks on one of your webpages, you could include the nofollow tag on three of them, thus obtaining more mileage from the other three links.

Another method for page sculpting is the no-index tag, which essentially takes the concept behind the nofollow tag steps further by directing Google to ignore an entire webpage, rather than just a link or two. Your Arizona SEO firm could use this strategy to detract attention from less important webpages, such as a checkout page or a terms and conditions page. While such pages are obviously a necessary component to the functionality of many websites, they do little to establish search engine relevance and market authority.

PageRank Sculpting and Your Phoenix SEO Campaign

The bottom line, even before the announcement at the SMX Advanced conference, your Phoenix SEO company should already know that placing inappropriate links and unreliable content will have a negative impact on your website, regardless of whether the nofollow tag is included on your links. Changes to the Google algorithm may actually be the consequence of some SEOs abusing page sculpting techniques.

Unless your website is fairly large in scale, your Arizona SEO firm should keep page and link sculpting efforts to a minimum, adhering to the best practices guidelines established by Google. Above all else, your Phoenix SEO campaign should emphasize fresh content, information architecture, internal linking and link acquisition.

Now that we know Google is changing its algorithm to pin down page sculpting, the greatest takeaway point here is that SEO is continuously evolving. You should expect your Arizona SEO company to be on top of its game, ready to address and adapt to frequent changes in the fast-paced realm of Search Engine Optimization.