As reported by Search Engine Land, Google announced the death of PageRank sculpting, the practice of squeezing PageRank to certain pages by placing nofollow tags on some links. Danny writes:
So today at SMX Advanced, sculpting was being discussed, and then Matt Cutts dropped a bomb shell that it no longer works to help flow more PageRank to the unblocked pages. Again — and being really simplistic here — if you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.
For me, this is good news, I once had witnessed an SEO consultant spend 3 days sculpting PageRank on one page with little or no effect, unbelievable.
This will mean the ‘nofollow’ tag will be used more for its intended purpose, on links such a ‘privacy’ or ’sign-in’ and of course ‘paid links’.
