PageRank Sculpting Explained
The idea behind the name PageRank Sculpting is not hard to understand. PageRank is the name of the algorithm Google uses to calculate importance for pages based on linking across the entire internet. Mind you, PageRank is just one of many algorithms Google uses to actually rank your pages in search engine result pages. The sculpting part comes from the ability to control how link juice flows throughout your own website.

PageRank Sculpting Examples

1. Many blogs are full of links to various social bookmark and community services. I love social websites such as StumpleUpon, del.icio.us and Digg, but there is a downside to them if you are running a blog.

   Say you are writing a blog post that has one or two links to websites you find interesting. You may think you are giving some nice link love to them; however, by far most of it will be eaten by all those social bookmark links many blog posts are filled with.

   I support the idea of linking to other websites, but at least consider nofollow links that are repeated in each and every blog post you make. If you don’t, even the link juice that flows through your internal links may be diminished in value.

2. The other more conventional area of PageRank sculpting is simply to ensure your important pages, e.g. those promoting your products, get more internal link weight than less important pages such as legal and contact.

   Strategies vary, but if you have a vast number of non-important pages, you can nofollow or limit the number of internal links to them.

PageRank Sculpting Tool
This post would not be complete without a pointer to a website analysis tool we offer that can help you experiment with PageRank Sculpting using robots.txt, noindex and nofollow in <meta> tags, and nofollow in <a> link tags.

A1 Website Analyzer can scan your entire website and all links in it. You can also enable/disable various options for finding links (e.g. enable/disable nofollow support).

After website scan has finished you are shown the entire website and with columns of data for each URL. The important columns in the context of PageRank sculpting are:

• Links to external URLs.
• Links to internal URLs.
• Linked by internal URLs.
• Calculated importance score.
• Scaled importance score.

The importance is calculated by weighing the strength of all links and pages within a website. Links gives more juice if they come from an internally highly linked page that contains few other links. The scaled importance score is logarithmic and have range 0..10.

If you want to control link juice flow and sculpt your PageRank, A1 Website Analyzer is the website analysis tool you need

After scanning, you can view data for all pages. 5 columns in particular will be of interest to you:

• linked by internal
• links to internal
• links to external
• calculated “importance” score
• importance score scaled

The importance takes into effect the respective strength of all pages and links within your website. Example: A link carries more weight if it resides on a highly linked page that contains few links. The scaled importance is logarithmic and assigns a value between 0 and 10.

In addition to above data, A1 Website Analyzer also shows document character set, file size, response time etc. As a small extra bonus, you can even have your entire website scanned for HTML errors. That is, however, slightly slow since it uses the online W3C HTML validator API – and takes much care not to stress it .