PageRank sculpting — have you ever heard of it? This is one of the worst ideas to come out of the search engine optimization community in years. Debunked by many leading experts in the field, PageRank sculpting nonetheless gained in popularity over the past few years because enough SEOs who don’t understand how to analyze search results kept repeating false claims that PageRank sculpting was working for them. When challenged by other SEOs to prove their claims, the PageRank sculptors were unable to do so.
And when Google itself finally told the SEO community to stop sculpting PageRank in the middle of 2009 many SEOs simply chose to ignore the search engine. Google admitted it had changed the way it handles link value as far back as 2007 because PageRank sculpting was hurting Websites. And yet the PageRank sculptors never realized that their cheap linking tricks weren’t having any effect on the search results. Some of the arguments against PageRank sculpting made very cogent points but even these voices of reason have been ignored.
What we can say with complete certainty is that Google employees have been advising people NOT to try to use PageRank sculpting as far back as 2007. Despite the hints from Googlers that PageRank sculpting might not be good for Websites, SEOs who should have known better continued to abuse this bad practice. PageRank sculpting was in reality only covering up bad Website design with even worse Website design. Not one of the advocates of PageRank has ever been able to show that any Website has benefitted from PageRank sculpting.
Some very bad attempts to prove that PageRank sculpting works have been widely criticized and debunked. Nonetheless the PageRank sculptors have persevered. There is no knowing how much money they have cost their clients in lost search rankings and visibility. You can be sure that anyone who is still practicing PageRank sculpting today is not a very good SEO. If they are going to ignore even Google and try to improve search results by blocking crawlers from finding certain pages on sites, they deserve to lose the rankings they have worked so hard for.
Although less radical methods for sculpting PageRank are now being promoted the would-be sculptors still have no way of measuring real PageRank so they don’t know if or when or how their changes take effect. These people are shooting in the dark, practicing very untrustworthy search engine optimization. The best SEOs in the field advise people to NOT try to sculpt PageRank. It is a false idea that cannot work.
