I’d be interested to hear a follow up on this. I’m re-looking at one of my sites. My concern is having a good accessible nav structure (semantic css dropdowns tick that box) but not have too many boiler plate links per page (from a google guidelines perspective of 100 links per page). Am I simply thinking too hard about this problem?

HoHum

When actually executing this, which I’ll get into in a future post (work in progress), you need to be very careful not to create black holes that suck pages out of the index as you describe…unless of course you don’t care that certain pages are not crawled or end up supplemental.

Based on trial and error, I can attest that sometimes the changes you make while doing this DO NOT have the end result you expected, so testing is crucial.

In the case of the site I am using as my example, the 80 pages in the site map style navigation all get a little bit of pagerank passed to them, while the other 920 or so pages linked to by the 80 pages in the top nav hardly get any. It’s those 920 pages that this can potentially help…if done very carefully and surgically.

“Just DON’T LINK to pages you don’t want the search engines to find and index, that you don’t want to pass internal anchor text to, and that you feel are not providing value to your visitors.”

In some situations where you don’t have full editorial and design control over a site, you can’t just remove links that have negative effects on the organic SERPs. You need to take the lemons you are handed and make the closest thing as possible to lemon-aid.

-Pete

BZZT!

Sorry but that dog won’t hunt. In calculating PageRank, it would all even out in the end. Those deep links are necessary for CRAWLING and — if the site owner understands how anchor text works — they are good for PASSING ANCHOR.

Matt Cutts never endorsed the use of NOFOLLOW for sculpting PageRank the way Rand misinterpreted on his blog. Matt did say that Google won’t punish sites for using it, but given that people have not thought this whole business through, there will be plenty of self-inflicted punishment for anyone who really tries to follow this bad advice.

If you want to “sculpt PageRank”, you don’t need to use REL=’nofollow’. Just DON’T LINK to pages you don’t want the search engines to find and index, that you don’t want to pass internal anchor text to, and that you feel are not providing value to your visitors.

If I were going to “sculpt PageRank”, I would only do it on a blog where lots of duplicate content pages are created through multiple post archive pages.

That’s really the only type of site where it’s safe to play the Russian Roulette game of “sculpting PageRank”.