InsureMe Affiliate Blog: Is Link Sculpting with “Nofollow” Bad SEO?

Snow Sculpting.jpg There’s a bit of an uproar going on over at Search Engine Land about an article written by Shari Thurow’s called “You’d Be Wise To “NoFollow” This Dubious SEO Advice.”

In the column, Shari suggests that SEO not use what a lot of SEOs call “link siloing” or “pagerank sculpting” because is being used to improve rankings and not to improve user experience.

For those who don’t know, link siloing is basically the act of using the “nofollow” tag on links to unimportant pages on your site (unimportant from a search standpoint - like privacy policy, T&C, etc.) so that other links without the “nofollow” attribute get more link juice from the linking page.

Shari seems convinced that the overuse of “nofollow” will eventually be considered a bad thing by Google, even though Google’s Matt Cutts has said publicly:

Yes, webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages

Now I won’t deny that Google can change their mind about this kind of thing, but the way I look at it, using “nofollow” internally is the same thing as giving different levels of importance to different pages on your site when you use Google Sitemaps. Google wants us to point out our best and most important pages; it helps them find the best content. I figure if Google can’t decide what pages are most important from external links alone, they are more than happy to have help a bit of help figuring out the importance through internal links.

I’ve been using link sculpting in my SEO efforts and guess what? It works. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. Just check out the comments section on Sphinn about this post and you’ll see evidence that sculpting is working for other people too. To me, controlling the flow of your internal link juice is an SEO best practice, not some sort of trick to fool people.

I know Shari is all about sparkling white hat SEO, but I don’t see why link sculpting isn’t included in her definition. Maybe it just seems too easy or something.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see if she responds to any of the critiques of her article. So far, she’s been silent.