We are continuing on from DAY 7: Understanding The Link Juice Flow and this is the start of a new week for Day 8 from our series of guest posts.

“Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.”

- Bertolt Brecht -

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 comes free, there’s a price to pay for this luxury 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 show you today.

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 PR3-4, what a waste of resources!

As you can see on my site, the “About Nicolas” and “Contact Me”

pages are sculpted (red color); I like myself but I don’t need to rank for those pages, so I’ll save the link juice for the other pages of my 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

As you can see on my site, I have 3 links on each page of my site that links back to my homepage, each with a different anchor text:

• “SEO Help by Nicolas Prudhon”
• “Unleash WEB2.0 Optimization for Human Visitors and SearchEngines”
• “Home”

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, (like me), set aside the template design, you are very likely to have at least 3 links to each of your post from your homepage like I do:

• Post Title
• “Read more…”
• “xx 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.

With the site sculpting, here’s what’s happening:

Exercise

Depending on your background, and assuming that you don’t have a site yet, (after all, we are still designing our site structure) add to your sitemap design which page should be sculpted, and in some specific instances like the examples I gave, which rules should be followed.

All of this will ensure that by the time you will need to design your site or hire a web designer, nothing is left to chance, and you’ll get a site readily optimize, rather than having to make changes over and over.

As you already know now, the deeper you link, the more you lose link juice in the process, and more often than not, by the time the search engine spider reaches one of your far far away page (especially true for people with a bad site structure, but that shouldn’t be your case anymore, right?) there isn’t enough link juice left to maintain the page in the search engine at all!

This is at that time that your pages are dropped from the search engine, and as a SEO Master you can’t let that happened to your site!

If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson below.