A hot new tactic for SEO?

'PR Sculpting' is the tactic, and it involves using the 'nofollow' tag to hoard your link juice into specific pages and thereby increasing the rankings for that page.


How it works
As most of you know the Google 'Page Rank' of a specific page is a major factor leading to the high rankings of a specific phrase and the web page associated with it. (A crude measure of this is the green Page Rank indicator you can see at the top of your browser). Here's an example of a high PR (9)on the BBC site:-



The factors leading to the Page Rank of a page are the links coming into that page (both external links and also links from internal pages) and also links OUT of that page. Its a bit like the leaky bucket analogy used in marketing, but specifically here the quest is to maximise the inflow of link juice and minimise the outflow.

Maximising the inflow obviously involved increasing the backlinks to the page and also finding internal pages which can be used to link to the target page in an appropriate way.

Minimising the outflow involves using the 'nofollow' tag. There's a good article on the nofollow tag here where you can also see examples of how its structured. Essentially you are just telling the spider NOT to pass any link juice out to the linked pages. (Human viewers can still follow the link of course its just that the spiders wont).

What sort of links is this relevant to?

Obviously there are some pages you want to pass link juice to but many you dont - including the obvious 'terms and conditions', 'about us', sign up forms etc.

We're experimenting with this at the moment and so far the results are encouraging. Here's more detail on it Page Rank Sculpting and here's a good example - SeoMoz example.

Give it a shot - you have nothing to lose and only better ranked pages to gain.

A Website that does the business

Here's an example of a recent web project that delivered an extraordinary return on investment.

Again the return was down to the power of Google Base. You can see the search example below for 'ricoh copiers' (click to enlarge the image) and the little shopping bag icon indicating the snippet has come from G Base.




This 'top of Google' result was delivered within one week of the website going live (it took around 2 weeks to build) and was responsible for - along with similar searches - the whole cost of the web project being offset within 2 weeks of going live. That represents a staggering return on investment. I cant give you the actual figures for the obvious commercial confidentiality reasons, but I think you can see that moving into pure profit after a couple of weeks if pretty impressive stuff.

Its quite a simple website as you can see below (click to enlarge the image).



Essentially its just of collection of very good product landing pages, with good calls to action with traffic driven from Google Base. So, if you've got products to sell get them on Google base and ensure you drive people through to relevant and well constructed product pages. You cant fail to generate business.

Thanks Google! - a great new solution to an old problem

Ive discussed the issues of SEO and hosting before - in a nutshell where your site is hosted could have an impact on your search engine rankings. In particular if you have a .com (or .net, .biz etc) google will use your hosting location to determine where to give you rankings (eg - a .com domain hosted in the US will provide rankings in the US - so hard luck if you want good UK rankings). To check where you are hosted and for full details here's the full post - Rankings and Hosting


Google Webmaster Central to the Rescue!

We now have a neat solution to this problem - at Google Webmaster Central (GWC) you can now tell Google where you want your rankings. Just go to 'Tools' then 'set geographic target'- see below. Of course you'll need to register with GWC first - which is free - and which holds many other advantages.
(Click on the image to enlarge)




Some Other Useful Stuff you can do at GWC

You can see the details above but particularly useful is the 'crawl diagnostics' feature, and the 'statistics' which shows you amongst other things the top keyphrases you are getting found on.

Another problem in the past has been getting to know where your inbound links are coming from - the 'link' command at Google is notoriously unreliable, but now through GWT you can get a full and accurate summary of all links coming into your site.

The 'sitemap' facility is a good way to communicate to Google your web pages to ensure they all get spidered. Anyway, register and hava a play - its really useful.

Helping International SEO

It also provides a neat solution to the issue of getting rankings from different countries through the same site. Here's an example:-

Lets say your site is www.yoursite.com and you are looking for rankings in the UK. Lets say you have some translated French pages, German pages and US specific pages on your site through which you want to attract relevant keyword searchers from people searching in those countries.

You can use subdomains for these pages (eg www.francais.yoursite.com) or folders (eg www.yoursite.com/german) and either way you can use the 'set geographic target' facility to properly inform google where you want search results from for these pages. That is, you can tell google that specific parts of your site need to attract traffic from different areas.
If you want more detail on this here's a video clip at the GWC official blog.

Help needed - but theres' something in it for you...

We have several customers who need specific help with their rankings on specific keywords. How can you help?

You are aware of the importance of quality links, in particular quality nowadays means links from sites which are authoritative themselves (lets say as measured by Google Page Rank of 3 and above); have some contextual relevance; and have the right anchor text in the link.

So, here are a few customers of ours who would like such a link from you. In return, I will give you a link from a Page Rank 3/4 from my own website (or blog if you prefer) which will be a quality link as defined above. Here are the specific companies and web sites. Please get in touch with me if you wish to partake and I'll sort out the detail for you.

Towmaster UK.

This company manufactures and distributes exhibition trailers and a wide variety of other types of trailer including catering and box trailers. If you visit their site you will also see a gallery of their products which includes advertising trailers too. The phrase they are seeking to improve on is exhibition trailers. Are you happy to link to them?

Plumbnation

A hugely successful web venture and now, after six months, one of the leading suppliers of plumbing and heating products on the web. One of their main products is heating boilers of various types. For the term 'Worcester Boiler' we have great natural and Google Base rankings but need some help with another major brand, Vaillant Boilers. Again if you are happy to trade a link get in touch please.

ALS World Movers.

This company has had great success with 'pay per click' advertising. The company ships products from any place in the world to any other place. International shipping and excess baggage is their sector and they are looking for good links on the phrases - shipping to australia, shipping to New Zealand, Dubai and Canada. Will a link exchange be relevant to you?

Cloggs uk

A major online brand for the sale of all types of shoes and other fashion items. They have great natural rankings on all major phrases including dr martens, converse trainers, skechers trainers and many more. Because of an upsurge in competition in Ugg Boots, this is a term we want to focus on. Is it relevant to you to link using this term in exchange for a quality link back?. Give me a call or drop me an email and I'll sort out the details.

Ross Handling

This company's specialty is in the provision of industrial castors for a wide variety of applications including shopfitting, point of sale and product display applications. Some are of a specialist nature like the heat resistant ones supplied to the bakery industry. Their castors come in a range of materials including rubber, nylon and steel.