I think all SEOs believe it is important to control how the search bots view their site. All quality SEOs would agree this control begins with a quality site and information architecture. owever, no matter how strong your IA is you are likely to give the search bots small gateways and crevices to move into undesired portions of your site, and distribute your link equity to parts of your site that have no use beyond the on-site user.

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    Try to explain an issue that many starting out in this industry do not completely grasp, or understand the importance of. I myself had some misinformation on the topic that some were good enough to set me straight on.

    Kick up some discussion on the link siloing/link funneling/link juice sculpting/Page Rank Sculpting concepts around the industry.

This post will be dedicated to exploring the latter concept more completely.

Differences in Theory. I think all SEOs believe it is important to control how the search bots view their site. All quality SEOs would agree this control begins with a quality site and information architecture.

However, no matter how strong your IA is you are likely to give the search bots small gateways and crevices to move into undesired portions of your site, and distribute your link equity to parts of your site that have no use beyond the on-site user.

Remember that the game isn’t about how many pages you can get in the engines. The game is figuring out how to get as much conversion driven traffic to your site as you can. In the end the only numbers that matter have dollar signs in front of them.

In this game to dominate conversion driven traffic control over indexable content and shaping of link equity disbursement is important.

Some search proffesionals think that the use of the rel=”NoFollow” attribute alone is enough to shape their link equity, and control indexable pages. Others think that site or even page level robot control is enough to guide their strategy.

From Site Wide to Granular

The control of bots, as discussed in part by my previous post, can happen on one of three levels.

You can control bots on the site wide level through your robots.txt file, you can control them on the page level through the Meta Robots tag, or down to the link level through HTML attributes. (Another option is the x-robots-tag I discuss below, and which is really deserving of its own post.)

For maximum effect on bot control and link equity distribution, you should utilize all three. However, utilizing all of these concepts, and making sure they all agree can be tricky. (I give an example of how to utlize all three later in this post)

Here is a full breakdown of all of the REP capabilities.

Utilizing the REP to Control Link Equity

As stated above, there are two basic schools of thought here.

One is that by utilizing the the NoFollow Attribute on the link level you can help sculpt your PageRank or link juice on site.

The second is that by utilizing robots tags and you can shape this same equity and control bots on a larger scale.

Liken the attribute level to carving with a scalpel, and utilizing the site and page level as carving with a butcher knife.

The Difference in These Theories

The link level NoFollow attribute was designed by Matt Cutts and Google in conjunction with the two other major engines as a spam deterrent.

Cutts later came out with statements that utilizing this attribute was an acceptable way to help distribute your PageRank within your site.

In my opinion, there is a problem here.

On one hand the attribute was designed to effect outbound links. On the other we have Cutts telling us it is suitable for the distribution and flow of internal page rank.

Before the NoFollow attribute this concept was already in play in the form of strategically used Javascript, and NoFollow on a page level through Meta robots tags.

By utilizing the robots tag you can help shape your equity on a page level. By utilizing a NoIndex tag you are telling the bots that they can crawl your page and even follow links, but not index that page.

However as Matt Cutts pointed out,”A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page.”

So even if you use robots.txt and Meta NoIndex tags you are likely to still pass equity.