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As Search Engine Optimization becomes more complicated with more sophisticated search engine algorithms and tougher competition, the days of simply relying on optimized Page Titles and keyword stuffing are long gone.
Nowadays, search engine rankings are determined by a large number of variables found both on a business’s website and its outer network.
While we could likely write a whole book on the external forces that affect rankings, an important, and often overlooked, tactic that can affect your whole website’s SEO importance is called “Link Sculpting”.
Just like you can have links going to your website from another website, you have internal links all over the INSIDE of your website. For example, the connection between your homepage and your ‘about’ page is an internal link. On this site, ff you were to click the “services” item in our menu, that would be an internal link on the Motoza website.
Link Sculpting, also known as PageRank Sculpting, is the process of sculpting your website’s internal link architecture so that tells Google which pages are most important on your website. Much like the diagram shown above, Google gives a website a certain amount of ‘Page Rank” (pictured as water). Your Homepage, being the center and most visited page on your site, usually gets the bulk of this page rank (PR). The PR then flows through your website via the internal links you have present. If you have “100%” page rank on your homepage, and two pages linked to your homepage, each connected page would get “50%” PR.
However, imagine one of those pages is very important to your ranking (a product page, a service page, or a content rich article) and the 2nd page is less important to rankings, such as a Privacy Policy, contact page, or a links page. Since your more important page is more relevant to your business and contains more value for the visitor, you should direct more PR to that page. You do this by adding a ‘nofollow’ element to the links pointing to less important pages.
A ‘nofollow’ essentially tells Google not to go to that link. As a result, no Page Rank is sent to through that link, so the remaining Page Rank flows to your more important page.
It’s important to do this to all websites, regardless of the size or complexity. Not only does it make your site look more efficient to Google, it’s telling Google to consider your more important pages for rankings of their own.
Take some time to go through your site. Distinguish pages that you believe are important to your customers and those that provide very little value. By simply adding nofollows to those links, you’ve successfully “Sculpting” your website!
