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Live blogging from SMX East: Please forgive any typos or grammar mistakes; I will follow up later to correct them. I may expand on this later, but I’m keeping it brief to get the information out.

Speakers:

• Adam Audette, President, AudetteMedia, Inc
• Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting
• Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz
• Brent Payne, Director of Search Engine Optimization, Tribune Company
• Leslie Rohde, Founder and CEO, LeftSideSystems, LLC
• Shari Thurow, Founder and SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive

A great session about PageRank sculpting and the use of nofollow as a sculpting tactic.

Eric Enge

Eric Enge starts us off with an introduction to the nofollow and how it has been used in the past. In June of 2009, Matt Cutts stated at SMX Advanced that nofollow no longer works this way. Instead, this extra PageRank evaporates. But, is this the truth?

Eric Enge presents a case study on the use of nofollow. A large site decided to apply nofollow to most of the links in the main navigation. As a result, 75% of all links were nofollow. The result was that traffic and indexed pages experienced a drop. Eric recommended removing these nofollows. The result is that the indexed pages increased to the previous amount and the traffic went up to 30% over the previous high.

His conclusion, was that Matt Cutts was right. Nofollow is no longer the way to sculpt PageRank.

Leslie Rohde

Next up is Leslie Rohde. He talks about how we continue to discuss this topic, but the tactics and conversation are always changing.

Leslie talks about three reasons to block link juice. First, to cut off external bleeds to sites you don’t need to be linking to. Second, to prevent from wasting juice on non-money pages. Lastly, to optimize for profit shaping.

Leslie continues to show examples of two case studies where nofollow sculpting increased traffic by 100%. Both of these sites were large sites and Leslie recommends that sites with more than 10,000 pages is a good time to start sculpting.

Brent Payne

Brent Payne talks about sculpting with the Chicago Tribune, which is a very different type of site. This won’t work for all sites. He discusses an automated sculpting method, as well as a module system that removes content sections of the site. A new CMS allows content to be removed from the homepage, which reduces links from 600 to 200. This has a PageRank sculpting impact during breaking news scenarios.

Adam Audette

Adam Audette is up next and says nofollowing sculpting sucks, but tons of sites are still out there doing nofollow sculpting.

Ultimately, the goal is to push more link weight to some URLs and restrict link weight to others.

Ways to Sculpt PageRank

• Site architecture
• Landing pages
• Navigation
• Mini directories
• Internal linking

Basically, give important URLs prominence.

Lastly, Adam talks about how SEO is a HUGE part of Zappos’ $1 billion in online sales

Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin starts by agreeing with Adam’s and Brent’s advice. Rand discusses how much of SEO is for engines and not users. He continues on with a few images from his blog about the old and new model of nofollow.

Rand believes that sculpting is only really useful for solving one issue: indexing.

Since Google only crawls a limited number of pages per site, and nofollow can help control which pages receive PageRank, it could be detrimental to remove nofollow on large sites with more pages than Google will index.

The number of pages search engines will index is proportional to that site’s importance and popularity. SEOmoz has seen that removing nofollow can have a dramatic negative effect on indexation and search traffic.

Shari Thurow

Shari Thurow has a very different view than most SEOs on nofollow and PageRank sculpting. Her two main points were that nofollow sculpting is a band-aid for bad information architecture and that if a site has poor IA, it should be fixed. Shari continues about her background in web design, SEO and IA. She believes that SEOs and searchers have different mental models.

She shares a case study where she recommended NOT using nofollow. Instead, they fixed the site’s IA. Traffic went up 22% over the previous month and 21% over the previous year.

She believes a site should improve their information architecture instead of solving it with nofollow PR sculpting.

The Q&A

During the Q&A, everyone agrees that you should be careful what you link to from a user and SEO perspective. In addition, all believe you should be careful when responding to news. Don’t immediately react to news, because drastic changes may not be best.

There was a lot of disagreement on the topic of using nofollow as a sculpting tactic They were: depends, there are better tools, depends, use advanced techniques, not on all sites, disappearing links, and use nofollow, but not to structure the architecture.

Danny spent some time talking about how Google does a lot of internal sculpting that we cannot anticipate. Although we can do a lot of sculpting, search engines can completely change how they deal with our sites.

Brent also recommended using anchor text variation when linking internally to a landing page.

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