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Is PageRank A Good Link Building Strategy?

There are a lot of ethical SEO services out there, and also a lot of unethical or black hat techniques beign sued by SEO companies. The problem that can occur is that something which perhaps started off as legitimate can be abused and misused in various ways. When something begins to get a bad reputation, it develops into something much worse than what it originally was and ultimately could end up being a black hat technique after all. A classic example of this is PageRank sculpting. Several years ago this was a SEO technique that even Matt Cutts was shouting about. However, when we hear about it now we find ourselves with mixed reactions and a vast difference in opinion as to the effectiveness of it and whether it is even legitimate.

In case you are unsure of what is actually involved with PageRank sculpting, when it first appeared several years ago it was basically a technique used for increasing traffic to a websites more important pages and eliminating traffic to less important pages. The way in which this was done was via using a type of nofollow link, where the links on the less crucial pages were not visible to the search engines. This worked within internal page linking, too and in case you are wondering how this succeeded, it basically helped to streamline traffic more and prevented wastage to pages which were not essential. The main purpose of this was to increase page ranking within SERPs and it was a successful method, particularly for those websites which had a large number of web pages.

The problems began to occur for a number of reasons. Firstly, web developers and owners were wondering what the point of a page was if nobody was going to link to it, and secondly, people started to abuse it and use it as a solution for lazy web design. On top of these reasons there was another big factor involved, and that was the announcement that Google were going to stop acknowledging nofollow links, so in fact you would be completely wasting your time. The way in which it was portrayed suggests that Google does in fact consider your nofollow links as a contribution towards your final page ranking.

The reasons for Google doing this are actually quite obvious. For starters, nofollow links are commonly used to prevent spam sites, so if your website is using a lot of them then it could be said that they were involved in spam. Secondly, there appeared to be an increase in websites with poor navigation links and poor quality sites using PageRank sculpting to rank high. This meant that all they needed to do was create a couple of well made pages and the poorer ones could just be nofollowed.

Ultimately there is a place for PageRank sculpting, but in terms of link building strategies it does get mixed opinions. Used correctly in SEP it can help drive more popular pages to the top of the SERPs, however used unethically and it can have devastating effects on your website as a whole.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 8th, 2010 at 9:00 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed.

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Posted by Phil.

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2 Responses to “Is PageRank A Good Link Building Strategy?”

  1. senthiledp says:

    They all have a special aptitude for one of the hardest aspects of SEO, and since effective link builders are an especially rare, yet often overlooked breed, they’re being recognized here today.

  2. vstrategy says:

    Having to many Navigation links is truly make your website poor. Preventing to have many links with do-follow attribute will make your site more better than the others.

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