PR Sculpting - the Seomoz story

[glengara]

In a nut-shell Rand says they implemented no-follows on a bunch of internal links in mid-December and traffic has gone up 20% mostly in the long-tail.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/sculpting...etty-darn-well

No mention of any ranking changes though, which I'd have thought would be necessary to correlate the PR sculpting with the extra traffic.

The interesting point for me though is if positive ranking changes were achieved simply through PR sculpting it would appear to point towards anchor text being weighted by PR, not something I've seen widely promulgated....

[jimbeetle]

Yeah, I read that earlier and couldn't find anything -- at least in what little data is there -- for me to hang my hat on any correlation.

[AussieWebmaster]

We have done some of this and it has been effective.

[jimbeetle]

Oh, I can see it being effective, I just need a bunch more basic data to say whether or not that was the cause in this instance.

[glengara]

Aussie when you say it was effective for you, can you say in which particular areas?

[AussieWebmaster]

by doing individual no follows to pages not needed to be indexed and dropping some that were just there - lessening the repetition may be a factor to test as well - gave the links left a bigger boost and improved relevancy (that part is my opinion)

[glengara]

So did you notice any impact on the rankings?

[AussieWebmaster]

yes but did not isolated the variables so changed titles etc could also have had an impact

[glengara]

Have to admit to both a bias against using no-follow to sculpt internally, and to a certain disbelief that raising PR will on its own raise rankings ;-)

Which is what interested me in the Moz experience, assuming most linkage to the long-tail is internal and the pages haven't changed in a while, it could have led to some revising of preconceptions :-)

Mind you, he might also be keeping any ranking stats info behind the velvet rope....

[randfish]

On the contrary, Glen - we just don't track ranking that closely. I can certainly say that the increase in search traffic came from the tail much more than from the head of the search curve. I also noted in the comments on the post that one of the other noticeable phenomenon was the inclusion of many more of our archived blog content in Google's index

[glengara]

...the inclusion of many more of our archived blog content.."

That's more the result I'd have expected from PR sculpting, pity about not having the ranking data though; at least my preconceptions are safe for now.

So chaps, what about PR weighting anchor text, any hunches?

[jimbeetle]

Rand, thanks for stopping by and pointing us back to the comments to the original post. Great discussion going on over there. I'd chime in, but Danny's "sculpting in general bugs me," kind of sums up my thoughts.

what about PR weighting anchor text, any hunches?

Sure, could be, why not? I'm just having a problem trying to figure out how it can be sussed out by testing, i.e., separating the basic PR effect of a link from any "PR weighting" given to the anchor text.