Page Rank sculpting - worth the effort

[MktgRob]

Page Rank Sculpting has been present in the world of SEO for a few years now and the opinions of it are still all over the place. Some SEO experts believe that PR sculpting should only be used when all other SEO options are exhausted while others think that it should be part of the initial planning of a site. Some think that it is best suited for large sites with 1,000s of pages while others think that any size site will benefit. And the more damning question, does use of PR sculpting make you Batman or the Joker?

To be honest, I have never done it as I am of the mind that it is best suited for the supersized, multipage sites. But as I do more follow up I am starting to understand that as part of a well-planned SEO process that is mapped out as the site is being built. I will give it a try and see what happens. Are there any other sculpters out there?

[vanhove]

I do not find sculpting necessary. Any expert in SEO will tell you that it is all about links and the anchor text in those links that point to your website.

Search engines view links as votes for a particular website. Links are the biggest off page criteria that search engines evaluate your site on.

On page criteria is fairly simple. Achieve the optimal word densities for your keyword then leave it to the links to take over the search result.

[jreseo]

You may be getting at two things here:

1. Internal linking structure for crawling
2. "Sculpting" specific links to flow or not flow page rank

The first is critical for any initial site design. Make sure all pages key to SEO on your site can be reached via HTML links from the home page, have a reasonable number of links on each page to other pages (<100 or so), keep depth of hierarchy to a minimum, etc. This is especially critical for larger sites (>1000 pages).

Going beyond a basic SEO-friendly linking structure is actually "sculpting" that structure to flow page rank in specific ways. For example, using rel=nofollow on links to pages that don't really matter for SEO, and placing extra links in key places to give more PR flow to important pages.

I think the first of these is absolutely critical. The second ("sculpting") is more in the category of fine-tuning, where it is certainly worth doing but not the highest priority. I'd make sure your basic structure, content and external linking are in place before worrying about detailed PR sculpting.

[MktgRob]

You may be getting at two things here:

1. Internal linking structure for crawling
2. "Sculpting" specific links to flow or not flow page rank

The second ("sculpting") is more in the category of fine-tuning, where it is certainly worth doing but not the highest priority. I'd make sure your basic structure, content and external linking are in place before worrying about detailed PR sculpting.

So if I take this last part of your post at face value, you are somewhat in agreement with my original post that sculpting, while not to be made a major part of site building strategy, it is something that should be considered a necessary strategy. Am I correct in that assumption?

[snapshot]

PR is not going to say the first and last world in the SEO world anymore and therefore a recommended idea could possibly be shifting attention from that towards the actual rankings of the websites running over the net. The visits made on the pages are more important than having a green bar with some digits about that.