Why SEO PageRank Sculpting Efforts Fail
Have you ever wondered if search engine optimization is worth the money people pay for it? According to SEMPO (the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization) more than $1 billion was spent on American SEO services in 2009. And that is just the “organic” SEO, not paid search management services. Search engine optimization is big business and many companies have tied some or all of their revenues to the success of search engine optimization. So imagine how angry these companies might be to learn that they have been duped by snake oil SEO tricks.
Unfortunately, that is exactly what has happened to many companies that have worked with SEO consultants who practice or preach the shaky concept of PageRank sculpting. Now thoroughly discredited by Google itself, PageRank sculpting is a shady SEO tactic developed in 2007 by incompetent SEOs who did not know how to get the right pages on Websites to rank for company names. Instead of fixing easily resolved site organization issues these bad SEOs broke the sites’ navigation systems to hide the pages they could not properly manage.
Many people have pointed out that Google employees have advised people not to practice PageRank sculpting since 2007. And the reason Googlers have tried to persuade the SEO community to abandon this harmful practice was finally disclosed over the summer of 2009. At an SEO conference, Google employee Matt Cutts announced that so many Websites were being harmed by PageRank sculpting that Google felt compelled to take an extraordinary measure: either in late 2007 or early 2008 Google changed the way it calculates PageRank for internal links to prevent PageRank sculpting from doing any more harm.
What is both sad and laughable is that all through the time Google’s change was unnanounced, everyone who favored PageRank sculpting insisted that their tests proved it WAS working. These idiots could not even see that their PageRank sculpting was being ignored by Google! So why should anyone believe their cracked ideas now as they roll out New! and Improved! PageRank sculpting?
If you’re doing business with an SEO who wants you to sculpt your PageRank you should run far, far away as fast as you can. You can only expect to lose valuable traffic from their sculpting. It’s possible that other things the PageRank sculpting SEOs do will make up for their stupid tricks, but why would you want to spin your wheels like that?
February 10th, 2010