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Have you seen the latest fad that seems to be sweeping the search engine optimisation world at the moment? It's called something like page rank sculpting and it relies heavily on the 'nofollow' tag.

According to those who want to peddle the merits of page rank sculpting it channels page rank away from useless pages such as the contact and about us pages and focuses it all on the important pages ... you know, the ones you really want to do well in the search engines, the ones that you want people to see, the ones where you can really make the money. And you know what? I think it's all just another waste of time cooked up by someone who felt that their image as a search engine optimisation guru was slipping.

You want to waste your time sculpting your pages then go right ahead but to me it's really just a major step backwards instead of a leap forwards. What those who are trying to achieve something by sculpting their pages think they're doing is a major step back to the days when everyone arrived on your index page. They're ignoring the fact that every page should be a doorway to your site ... even the contact and about us pages.

One well-known but out of favor search engine commentator suggested that if you have pages that you really don't want to have listed then they shouldn't be up there on the web in the first place. Every page you build for a website should add value to your website and every page of a website should be a doorway to the rest of the site.

Of course, those who want to waste their time sculpting pages don't see it like that. Instead they see sculpting as a cunning plan to gain them betting rankings in the search engine results pages and they don't want to hear that what they're doing has a distinctly negative side to it. Think about it for a while and you'll see what an unwise practice it really is.

For example those who are trying to change the way search engines see their pages and websites are leaving a very obvious footprint in their code and what will happen if the search engines decide that trying to manipulate your page rank is against their rules?

Of course those who are big on sculpting are claiming that Matt Cutts - the Google spokesman - has said that it's ok to fiddle around with your page rank but has he really? It seems that maybe he hasn't said that at all and a careful re-reading of all of his
comments on the subject may show that he's not as in favor of sculpting as some would have you believe.
And then of course there's the other problem with page rank ... who really does know what page rank is and what real value it has for your site and/or your web pages? Is it really as important as many search engine gurus would have you believe? If you've read my brain dumps on search engine optimisation before you'll know that I think page rank is just a plain crock of you know what.

Just before Easter Google seems to have slipped in an interesting update to their algorithm and people are reporting loss of rankings and a complete loss of indexing of some sites. We're seeing some interesting sites appear above a couple of sites belonging to our mainstream clients and those competing sites have no page rank at all while our clients' sites have some reasonable page rank numbers ... so you want to tell me that page rank is important?

I fully expect that in the next week or so our clients' sites will go back to their rightful places - above those competitors' sites - in the search engine results pages because we've ticked all the right boxes while those competitors haven't and not because of anything to do with page rank. We've done the on-page optimisation, we've done the linking, we've got regular updates happening, we see every page on every one of the sites we've built for our clients as a doorway to the whole site and we're not obsessed with page rank.

Of course what I've said may not sound all that sexy and in the world of search engine optimisation I'm just a nobody so feel free to ignore me ... and others like me ... and follow the gurus who want to lead you astray ... God knows there are plenty of them out there.

On the other hand you can sit back and carefully review whatever the latest fad might be in the light of what you already know about search engine optimisation and what your own experience tells you is right and make a more informed decision. The choice is yours and ultimately your success or failure is going to depend on what you choose to do ... not on what some self-proclaimed guru tells you is right or wrong.