Page rank sculpting is a process of minimizing the job of search engines like Google, where only relevant and sales prospective links of a website are displayed on a search result page. A website may contain anywhere from 20 pages to 1000s of pages. Assuming the site has information that the user requires based on the keywords he uses for his search, it becomes a very long drawn process of Google trying to pick a user specific link from the infinite pages a website contains. This is where Page rank sculpting could be made use.  As a result the flow from a website could be sculpted by only allowing customer relevant page links to flow through the Google search that are automatically page ranked, high.

It is not every web designer’s cup of tea to be an expert at page rank sculpting. As the name suggests- Page rank sculpting, one could justify this technique only when he knows the knack of carefully sculpting out those pages in the website that you would want Google to rank in its search engine index. How is this exactly done? In order to have your website successfully page rank sculpted, your SEO consultant needs to invest a lot of time understanding closely the factors that would enhance the popularity of the site, ultimately launching a new horizon to its success. The no-follow tool is used to clearly discriminate less powerful pages from the other for Google, leading it to picking up the link juice that are highly prospective from the customer point of view. In this process it should be taken care that the page rank sculpting doesn’t fissure out into relevant pages. This could have a disastrous or rather a very contradictory effect. Page rank sculpting is no child’s play and is not something that every Optimizer is actually good at. Ensuring the following things will give you smooth and prosperous outcomes from a page rank sculpting that you do for your online business.

Tips for using Page Rank Sculpting on your website :

1. Keep in mind to incorporate sculpting when the site is under construction itself as it saves you a lot of time and money.
2. A single pointed effort is the basic and primary ingredient this technique demands as any small aspect overlooked could reverse the effects.
3. Sculpting with various tools like META no index tags, robots.txt file or javascript could make page rank sculpting more effective.
4. Be aware of not leaking this strategy onto relevant pages as the very purpose of page rank sculpting goes down the drain.
5. Have a clear and organized plan before you begin with page rank sculpting your website. This makes things simpler and gives you a clear checklist to compare your work with.

Get the connoisseurs in the industry to play with this wonderful tool of page rank sculpting for you in order to see optimized results in the form of a successfully progressing online business.
Note : It has been much debated since  Google and other Search Engines adopted the NoFollow tag , you can read about it at Page Rank Sculpting – An anamoly In Google’s Policy?

Now lets look closer at “Cloaking”, a very well known Black Hat SEO technique which is banned by google and other search engines as well.

How Google defines cloaking in its webmaster is as  “Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index”…

Did you read that carefully?? I sure hope you did.

Answer this then : Does not Page Rank Sculpting using “NOFOLLOW” come very close in premise to “CLOAKING” ?

Well, I am sure google has its best intentions in defining the “Nofollow” tag as it will definitely increase the quality of the links in its database if used properly. However, as they say, “Every tool can be made a weapon”  and in the same light, “nofollow” does provide the power to actually legitimately use cloaking.

People across the internet have had there own views and ways of explaining what they perceive from this anamoly in google’s policy.

My Understanding : I personally feel that google needs to probably change the definition of “Cloaking” to make it more specific. What we see here is basically the fact that google would consider a website being cloaked if, and only if the content provided to the search engine is not provided to the user as well, and the vice versa not applying. So primarily a set of pages can be made viewable to the search engine from a larger set of pages visible to the users. However the set viewable to the search engines should not be hid from the users and that in my opinion should be termed as “cloaking” in the webmasters documentation.

Why this makes sense : Cheating a search engine would by definition mean serving content to it which is not viewable by the Users of the site. However there can always be content on the website for the users which bears no particular interest from the search engine’s point of view. We already have the robot.txt and other mechanisms for doing the same and “nofollow” will just be another addon to the arsenal.

Though Page Rank Sculpting is a neat little way to squeeze the extra bit in the right direction, I would recommend going for it once your link building campaign has reached a threshold which cannot be breached without significant effort.

Conclusion : Google can always review there webmaster documentation to make it more specific , however I do not see how Page Rank Sculpting using Nofollow tags be considered anywhere close to deception.