Sculpting Your Website Structure for Maximum SEO Exposure
It’s time to patch the holes on your site. Despite the recent buzz about site sculpting no longer working, I have to tell you that I don’t buy that at all, and decide to share with you what’s site sculpting is all about and how you can implement it on your site. Even if the situation was to be proven true, it can’t hurt you to learn and how more about it!
Why Should You Sculpt Your Site?
Link juice flowing throughout your site is much like electricity. The more electricity you have at your disposal, and the more convenient it is for you to use powerful electric appliance that make your everyday life easier. Now, this doesn’t come free, there’s a price to pay for this luxury and that’s your utility bill each and every month.
Being a person with no sub-standard, I would say that I don’t intent to consume less to reduce my bill, but instead prevent to pay for wasted energy. Just ask yourself how many electric devices you have in your house that you don’t use, but yet consume electricity, how many power switches do you have turned on, even though you don’t use the equipment?
Well, it’s the same with the link juice on your site. The more you have flowing on your pages, the more things you can do and the better you do it, and you certainly don’t want to have less. Now, you worked very hard to acquire that link juice so I do believe that just like electricity you don’t want part of your work going to waste either.
What do you think is happening when the link juice on your site flows onto pages that you don’t want or don’t need to have indexed in the search engines? Aren’t you wasting some of that precious energy that could be better used on another page? This is what I’m going to explain in this blog post.
Site Sculpting Basics:
Now that you understand how link juice flows onto your pages, it’s time to look at a bigger scale and consider the implications site wide.
Look at the diagram of a site without link juice control.
Now looks at the diagram of a site with link juice control.
Although not as important as it used to be in the past, the PageRank of a page is still a determinant factor for your search engine ranking position in Google. At equal factors, the page with the higher PageRank will be the one ranking better.
Since Google updated its rel=”nofollow” attribute control zone, sculpting link this way no longer work. That being said, I still believe that it is important for you to understand how this process works.
In recent news, it’s even said that JavaScript links and Flash links are now readable by Google; I haven’t tested this information yet, so I can’t guarantee it yet.
I don’t want to talk about the robots.txt here, as it’s really an overly powerful tool for beginners and any misuse could backfire on you in ways you can’t imagine.
So from this point on, I’m referring to using a dynamic JavaScript link to do site sculpting.
What Links Should You Preserve?
I initially wanted to start with the links you should sculpt but I changed my mind and think it’s better to start with the links you shouldn’t sculpt!
You know, just to plays safe and prevent you to sculpt the wrong links…
So which links you shouldn’t touch at all:
Do not touch any navigation link at all!
Messing up with your navigation links if you don’t fully know or understand what you are doing is the best way to destroy your site. In addition, I would recommend you to take extra care and precaution with links that points towards a page that itself links towards other pages.
What Links Should You Sculpt?
Obviously, the links you should sculpt are the one that won’t affect what’s happening on your site and your search engine ranking position if they “disappear”.
As a general rule, the following types of pages can be safely sculpted. (Please double check carefully on your site nonetheless)
- About
- Contact
- Shopping Cart
You’d be surprise as to how many ecommerce sites have a Shopping Cart with a PR 3 or 4, what a waste of resources!
Generally the “About Us” and “Contact Us” pages can be sculpted if you don’t want to split up your PR value for those pages, so that you’ll save the link juice for the other pages of your site.
Another instance for which you want to sculpt a link is if there’s a target repetition with irrelevant anchor text. Here are 2 examples of this.
Case 1: Homepage links
If suppose you have 3 links on each page of your site that links back to your homepage, each with a different anchor text like:
- Home
- About Us
- Contact Us
Having those 3 links may be convenient for navigation purpose, but when it comes to link juice and relevancy, only one of them is needed.
Without Sculpting, here’s what would happen:
With the site sculpting, here’s what’s happening:
Case 2: For Bloggers
If your site is a blog, set aside the template design, you are very likely to have at least 3 links to each of your post from your homepage like:
- Post Title
- Read the rest of the enrty
- Comments
Here again, it may be convenient for your users to have those 3 links on page, but for the search engines, it’s not necessary at all.
Without Sculpting, here’s what would happen:
With the site sculpting, here’s what’s happening:
Tags: PageRank Sculpting, Sculpting, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO Tips
January 19th, 2010 at 12:06 am
This is acceptable in terms of seo. Nada seems to irritate on them than that!This is exactly what was warned about some years ago at the last big blackhat con about seo in 1994!
January 28th, 2010 at 4:37 am
I think, that you are mistaken. Let’s discuss it. Write to me in PM, we will talk.
February 1st, 2010 at 1:45 am
regarding Search Engine Optimization. How to
February 1st, 2010 at 2:15 am
Some worth while posts on here and a load of good knowledge. If you get some free time, visit mine and come and take a look at my efforts over here at sandiegowebdesign-seo.com and give me a comment.
February 1st, 2010 at 10:58 pm
Great Info. I will add this post to my bookmarks.
February 2nd, 2010 at 6:49 pm
Seo contest held in the year a lot of this in 2010 by many parties, seo contest can also enhance our ability in seo
February 6th, 2010 at 8:20 pm
Fairly superb article, very useful information. Never ever imagined I’d find the info I want right here. I have been looking all over the internet for a while now and had been starting to get discouraged. Luckily, I stumbled onto your internet site and received exactly what I had been looking for.
February 8th, 2010 at 12:29 am
Hey very nice blog!!….I’m an instant fan, I have bookmarked you and I’ll be checking back on a regular….See ya
February 8th, 2010 at 3:48 pm
Very helpful post. Very clear commentary and suggested phrasing are most impressive, as are his and your generosity in sharing this explanation and example. I would also encourage everyone to bookmark this page to your favourite service to help spread the word. Thanks
February 15th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
I enjoy the awesome updates you have to give here.
February 18th, 2010 at 5:15 am
thanks man, ive been searching for this all over the internet
February 20th, 2010 at 12:14 am
Hey I landed on your page by fluke on yahoo while hunting for something completely obscure but I am very pleased that I did, You have just caught yourself another subscriber.
February 21st, 2010 at 11:07 pm
Though I would’ve loved it much more if you added a relevant video or at least pictures to back up the explanation, I still thought that your write-up quite helpful. It’s usually hard to make a complicated matter seem very easy. I enjoy your weblog and will sign up to your feed so I will not miss anything. Fantastic content
February 26th, 2010 at 3:56 pm
97% of people attempting to break into the Internet Marketing world end up buying product after product and then eventually give up due to “failure”. The other half join companies that never really allow them to generate the results that they can get from self-branding. Running a business online can be really daunting at times and even I felt at some stage that it wasn’t worth the wait.
February 28th, 2010 at 11:10 am
I am heading out for the night, but I just needed to post a comment here so I can remember to come back in the morning.
February 28th, 2010 at 10:57 pm
I enjoy your site and I have bookmarked it, Kind Regards
Bernice Johanson
Gucci Shoes
Gucci Sandals
March 2nd, 2010 at 4:37 pm
Lots of Fantastic information in your post, I favorited your site so I can visit again in the future, Thanks, Trinity Tidwell
March 7th, 2010 at 12:21 am
I normally dont publish insite but you Pressured me to, Amazing
March 7th, 2010 at 9:45 pm
Great post! This could possibly aid lots of people find out about this matter. Would you like to incorporate video clips along with these? It could certainly help out. Your reason was spot on and owing to you; I probably won’t have to describe all sorts of things to my pals. I can easily direct them here.
March 8th, 2010 at 12:24 am
Really nice post, thanks for taking the time to write that. I’ve been meaning to read up on that for a while now and didn’t think about it until today when I came across your blog. Putting it in my RSS feed! Take care
March 8th, 2010 at 1:50 pm
Seen your blog bookmarked by friend. Nice site.
March 9th, 2010 at 3:18 am
This is an interesting blog you have her but I can’t seem to find the RSS subscribe button.
March 10th, 2010 at 8:58 am
As a newbie, I usually search online for articles that can help me about my online studies. Wow this is a nice post. Thank you for sharing.I’ll keep asking for more!
March 14th, 2010 at 10:59 pm
Excellent blog. Continue doing.|I saved the url. Appreciate the great effort!
March 16th, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Hi good website yea nice job our review blog will soon be adding reviews on websites and add them to our blogs as the top best 25 websites to visit we also do reviews on Consumer Reports reviews all types of reviews
March 18th, 2010 at 2:34 am
my God, i thought you were going to chip in with some decisive insght at the end there, not leave it with ‘we leave it to you to decide’.
March 18th, 2010 at 3:26 am
There is obviously a lot to know about this. I think you made some good points in Features also. Keep working ,great job!
March 18th, 2010 at 11:05 pm
Hi, Good content throughout the site. This post iswhere I got the most useful information for my research. Thanks for posting, maybe we can see more on this. I also like this layout can you tell me where to get it
March 24th, 2010 at 11:16 pm
You might have a fantastic method of putting points into point of view.
April 1st, 2010 at 12:04 am
So I think for most posts there is simply no reason for a comment, because there is no debate reasons …
April 1st, 2010 at 9:31 am
Greatings, Super post, tienen que marcarlo en Digg
Truden
April 7th, 2010 at 11:47 pm
I am not such a good writer but make sure you, Let me attempt to talk about quite beneficial post. quite obvious commentary and suggested phrasing are most striking, as are his plus your generosity in berbagi this explanation and illustration. i would also encourage everyone to bookmark this page to your favorite support to assist multiply the expression. many thanks
April 22nd, 2010 at 8:29 am
After reading you site, Your site is very useful for me .I bookmarked your site!
April 23rd, 2010 at 3:41 am
very well information you write it very
clean. I’m very lucky to get this information from you.
April 23rd, 2010 at 9:16 am
Wonderful journey and experience!
April 24th, 2010 at 9:32 pm
Your WordPress blog keeps getting better and better!
I’ve been following your posts for a couple of weeks now and I gotta say that your older posts don’t offer as much insight as the newer articles. You have a lot more ideas and style now, your writing is constantly improving.
BTW, if you’re looking into placing some ads on your blog - you should really do it. Don’t go for all that 3rd party crap - Use a nice WordPress monetization tool coded by a friend of mine which by far the best, it’s a must have plugin for any serious blogger.
The BEST ad manager for WordPress. You can find it at Thaidy.com/BestWordPressPlugin and give it a free test-run (To make it easier for you, I linked my name to the site). Oh, and there is a nice discount coupon in the sidebar of the mainpage today.
Keep up the good work mate!
May 2nd, 2010 at 11:28 pm
Hello can I reference some of the insight found in this post if I provide a link back to your site?
May 2nd, 2010 at 11:54 pm
One again, your idea is very
good.thank you!very much.
May 3rd, 2010 at 3:01 am
i have enjoyed reading thank for sharing your story Greeting.
May 3rd, 2010 at 5:55 am
hey there outstanding little web site ya have here
I employ the identical web theme on my own website yet somehow for whatever weird reasons it looks to reload quicker on your blog eventhough your own provides a good deal more multimedia. Have you been making use of different plug ins or widgets that speed it up? Do you think you could possibly give the titles so maybe I would be able to use them in my own online site so twilight breaking dawn followers could watch twilight eclipse online trailers and films a lot quicker I’d be ever so happy - cheers ahead of time 
May 3rd, 2010 at 12:25 pm
I Apologize for my bad english, I think its a precarious piece of your writing. Well I will be suffering when having alot of difficulties in this condition but this article helps me
May 3rd, 2010 at 6:18 pm
great post as usual!
May 7th, 2010 at 12:36 pm
Terrific work! This is the type of information that should be shared around the web. Shame on the search engines for not positioning this post higher!
May 8th, 2010 at 2:13 am
Hey - nice blog, just looking around some blogs, seems a pretty nice platform you are using. I’m currently using Wordpress
May 12th, 2010 at 7:43 pm
howdy there, i just came across your website via bing, and i would like to comment that you express interestingly well via your website. i am truly struck by the mode that you write, and the subject is outstanding. in any event, i would also love to know whether you would like to exchange links with my website? i will be certainly more than happy to reciprocate and insert your link on in the blogroll. waiting for your reply, i would like to convey my appreciation and enjoy your day!
May 13th, 2010 at 1:01 am
i am happy to find it thanks for sharing it here. Nice work.
May 14th, 2010 at 5:43 am
I have often had similar thoughts about the subject. I am glad someone else feels the same way.
May 23rd, 2010 at 11:06 pm
Though I would’ve loved it much more if you added a relevant video or at least pictures to back up the explanation, I still thought that your write-up quite helpful. It’s usually hard to make a complicated matter seem very easy. I enjoy your weblog and will sign up to your feed so I will not miss anything. Fantastic content
May 23rd, 2010 at 11:39 pm
I read your articles and get a lot of info that I never know before. It’s hard to find knowledgeable people on this topic, but you sound like you know what you’re talking about!
May 25th, 2010 at 4:20 am
Hello,I love reading through your blog, I wanted to leave a little comment to support you and wish you a good continuation. Wishing you the best of luck for all your blogging efforts.
May 25th, 2010 at 10:34 am
Very informative text. I’ve found your site via Yahoo and I’m really glad about the information you provide in your posts. Btw your blogs layout is really broken on the Kmelon browser. Would be really great if you could fix that. Anyhow keep up the good work!
May 25th, 2010 at 6:23 pm
This post was very nicely written, and it also contains a lot of useful facts. I appreciated your professional manner of writing this post. Thanks, you have made it easy for me to understand.
May 26th, 2010 at 11:32 am
Thanks for taking this opportunity to discuss this, I feel strongly about it and I take pleasure in learning about this topic. If possible, as you gain information, please add to this blog with new information. I have found it extremely useful.
May 26th, 2010 at 4:27 pm
Hi. I wanted to drop you a quick note to express my thanks. I’ve been following your blog for a month or so and have picked up a ton of good information as well as enjoyed the way you’ve structured your site. I am attempting to run my own blog but I think its too general and I want to focus more on smaller topics. Being all things to all people is not all that its cracked up to be.
May 26th, 2010 at 5:41 pm
Heard about this site from my friend. He pointed me here and told me I’d find what I need. He was right! I got all the questions I had, answered. Didn’t even take long to find it. Love the fact that you made it so easy for people like me.
May 26th, 2010 at 8:38 pm
Have you had problems with spammers? I also use Blog Engine and I have some good anti-spam practices; please Email me if you are interested in an exchange of practices.
May 27th, 2010 at 12:03 am
This post was very nicely written, and it also contains a lot of useful facts. I appreciated your professional way of writing this post. Thanks, you have made it very easy for me to understand.
May 27th, 2010 at 12:14 am
Intimately, the post is in reality the freshest topic on this registry related issue. I concur with your conclusions and will eagerly look forward to your forthcoming updates. Saying thanks will not just be enough, for the wonderful clarity in your writing. I will immediately grab your rss feed to stay abreast of any updates.
June 3rd, 2010 at 5:08 pm
I tried to subscribe to your rss feed, but had a problem adding it to google reader. Could you please check this out.