Inside AdSense. PageRank Sculpting: Parsing the Value and Potential Benefits of. Thanks to the SEOmoz Q+A, we get to monitor a lot of the hot button issues that hit the SEO world, and as Jane noted to me during a meeting today, they always seem to come in waves. The latest buzz (and flurry of questions) comes around the practice of PageRank sculpting. We've discussed this topic in some detail previously on SEOmoz (1, 2 and 3) and recently published a guide.
However, with renewed interest comes a need for renewed focus. Does PageRank Sculpting Work? The simplest answer is yes. It definitely does work - the devil is in the details of how well and to what extent it brings value. However, anyone can set up a simple test to watch PageRank sculpting with nofollow in action. Create a new page in a test environment (either on a new domain or in a new section of an existing site). This illustration shows the basic principle of link flow and how nofollow impacts it: Does PageRank Sculpting Matter for My Site? That all depends on what kind of site you've got. That's OK by me. Good Cloaking, Evil Cloaking & Detection. Is cloaking evil? It’s one of the most heavily debated topics in the SEO industry – and people often can’t even agree on what defines cloaking. In this column, I wanted to look at an example of what even the search engines might consider "good" cloaking, the middle-ground territory that page testing introduces plus revisiting how to detect when "evil" old-school page cloaking is happening.
Back in December 2005, the four major engines went on record at Search Engine Strategies Chicago to define the line between cloaking for good and for evil. From the audience, I asked the panelists if it was acceptable to — selectively for spiders — replace search engine unfriendly links (such as those with session IDs and superfluous parameters) with search engine friendly versions. All four panelists responded "No problem. " URL Rewriting? My understanding is that their positions haven’t changed on this. I have to mention, you don’t have to cloak your pages to simplify your URLs for spiders. Deconstructing Grouped Google Results. My favorite session at SMX Advanced last month was “Give It Up,” the session where panelists shared little-known secrets. I’m a little biased, since that was the panel I spoke on. But still, as the last session of the two days, it really ended the conference with a bang. For those of you who didn’t attend, there was a 30 day moratorium on blogging/writing about the session.
Today marks the end of that embargo period, so without further ado, here’s the secret: You probably know that Google will group two results together when they are both from the same site—indenting the second of the two results indented beneath the first one. And do you know how to ascertain the true position of an indented (grouped) result? Let’s look at an example… A search on Google for “science experiment” returns one of our (Netconcepts’) clients at #1, as evidenced in the screenshot above. Hmm. Bingo! Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Google PageRank Checker.