PR Sculpting

by Darren McLaughlin

The idea of PR Sculpting has been in the “news” in SEO circles for awhile now. It’s not a complicated subject, so it’s understandable why people would go for it. The basic concept is you “sculpt” your PR through the careful use of “nofollow” tags. Of course, the basic idea of sculpting PR has no relation to the original meaning of nofollow, but that’s a story for a different day.

My opinion on a subject like “PR sculpting” is: there are better things to do with your time than worry about this crap. Apparently, I’m not alone. Here’s a statement by Vanessa Fox that sums up the situation nicely.

As for PR sculpting/no follow internal links, I think first of all that 99% of sites have lots of other more pressing issues to take care of. It’s like painting the molding in your house when your walls have fallen down and you have no windows. Spend your time on the fundamentals for the biggest impact. Spending lots of time on the minutia can provide diminishing returns that may not be worth the investment. I’ve never been a big fan of PR sculpting or using nofollow for this purpose. I like the use of nofollow to discourage comment spam, particularly now that so many sites allow user submissions. I think opening up your site to user contribution is awesome, but inviting spammers to submit all the links they want makes it a little less awesome. By using nofollow, those sites may at least be less attractive to spamming and might have to spend less time dealing with it.

I much prefer use of robots.txt for internal pages that you don’t want the search engine bots to spend time crawling. And as for PR sculpting, quality external links count so much more than internal links for ranking that I don’t know that sculpting is going to make that much difference in the scheme of things. It seems like a lot of effort for little pay off.

This may come as quite a blow to a new generation of “PR Sculptors”, but they’ll learn to adapt. In the universe of things you can do to improve your website, is this tactic really one of them? Sure, PR might make you feel warm and fuzzy as you bask in the warmth of the pixelated green. But is that really the type of green you’re concerned with? Not me.

When running websites, the lean, mean green known as the Almighty Buck is what counts. And how does a website really make money? With visitors, of course. The visitors make revenue skyrocket, not PR. I think we’re all best served trying to remember that when we determine how to do our internal linking.

Are you a PR sculptor? If so, what benefit have you seen from your efforts?