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Matt Cutts opened up a whole new world of possibilities when he told Rand from SEOmoz that it’s acceptable for a site owner to use nofollow on internal links to control the flow of PageRank within a site.

There’s a whole can of worms that has been opened up by internal use of nofollow being considered white hat. Matt muddied the waters a bit in this comment, but still indicates internal use of nofollow is a white hat tool webmasters can use by saying “It’s available if you want to get into that much fine-grained control.”

So far the best information I’ve seen about this is the Third Level Push (modified Siloing) For Deeper Index Penetration. That’s an excellent post, tool, and process, but it’s not the whole story. It’s also a little hard to get your head around.

On most sites, especially smaller ones, I don’t think PageRank sculpting is generally required. It may actually cause more harm that good.  On larger sites, especially where SEO is not a primary concern, PageRank Sculpting could make a huge difference in how linkjuice flows through your site.

Here’s one example.

PR Sculpting using internal nofollow tags may be helpful for a site with extensive multiple layers of site navigation as part of the template for a site. (Think your entire sitemap on every page.)

The one example I’m thinking of right now has over 80 links in css based drops downs in the top navigation bar. Granted, there are over a thousand pages on the site, so it still only links to a small fraction of the overall pages.

If your site only has a handful of site wide navigation links, link sculpting isn’t for you. However, if you have multiple levels of CSS based dropdowns leading deep into your site, including to areas not very valuable in terms of search traffic, you may be a good candidate for internal use of nofollow.

Having a large quantity of deep links from every page on your site can only help, right? Well, maybe not. By linking to a large number of pages from your site template, you end up spreading your link juice very thin over your entire site, like peanut butter on bread. While that may be what’s best, sometimes that does more harm than good.

Instead of spreading your link juice thinly over a large portion of your site, you may be better off strategically directing a larger portion of your PageRank to certain pages by properly implementing nofollow on some internal links. We’ll get into that in future posts.

Is your site navigation like peanut butter on bread? Is it helping or hurting the PageRank flow within your sites?  This is like a sharp knife…sometimes it’s the best tool for the job, but if you’re not careful…it could hurt or kill your site.