Search Engine Optimization

Google has made an official announcement at SMX advanced that it will no longer support Page rank sculpting and treat sculpted pages as regular pages. Danny from search engine land has a simple explanation:

Consider it like this. Imagine authority is money, and a particular page has $10 in “authority” to spend. It links out to 10 pages, so each of those pages gets $1 ($10 divided by 10). If it links to 20 pages, each gets 50 cents ($10 divided by 20). If it links to 5 pages, each page gets $2 (you get the math by now).

With the update a page with $10 in authority an 10 links will give each links a $1 in authority, regardless if the links were blocked.

The way the links are blocked from passing authority is with the rel=nofollow tag, which goes:

<a rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank” href=”http://searchengineland.com/microsofts-bing-vs-google-head-to-head-search-results-20006″>Anchor Text</a>

The nofollow attribute tells Google not to crawl the link, which in turn prevents pagerank flow to the linked page. The nofollow is the invention of Matt Cutts, head Google’s Antispam team. The tag was a measure against blog spam, but since been recommended by Google to be applied to paid links.

Read more on the topic.