Link Sculpting SEO
Now that we’ve discussed internal links in-depth, it’s time we hop onto link sculpting seo. It’s not as prevalent nowadays as before, which we’ll get into later, but sculpture your links could play a massive role in getting the right amount of link juice to the appropriate pages in your site.
Link sculpting SEO is the practice of “manipulating” search engines on the distribution of link juice/authority/PageRank in the pages of your site.
The goal is to stop the flow of authority to unimportant pages and get all the juice flowing to the important ones, i.e. target pages.
Remember nofollow links and how you should ideally set your links to dofollow? Well, in the concept of internal linking, nofollow links are a must.
Here’s an example:
I have a page containing 5 links. Each link is of equal importance, which means all 5 links have 20% authority (5 x 20 = 100%).
By using nofollow to sculpt your links, you can drive more power to your dofollow links.
So if 2 out of the 5 links are nofollow, then that means the 3 dofollow links have 33.3% authority (3 x 33.3 = 100%). This is because the 2 nofollow links are taken out of consideration.
In this case, you can nofollow ALL of your links except for that 1 link that you want to point to your target page. As a result, the page with the dofollow link gets ALL the juice, thus boosting its chances of ranking on top of SERPs.
However, SEOs caught on to this tactic and are now nofollowing all links except for a handful that points to pages they want to increase authority to.
This caused Google to render link sculpting obsolete:
Therefore, if you have 5 links and 2 of them are nofollow, that means the 3 remaining dofollow links pass 20% authority even if the nofollow links don’t. It’s because Google no longer considers nofollow links the same it did and distributes the authority to all the links on the page, regardless of link type.
Up to this day, the ineffectiveness of link sculpting has been the long-standing belief amongst SEOs.
However, based on my testing and the studies conducted by others, link sculpting still works and remains to have a place in your onpage SEO strategy!
Again, it all boils down to testing what works and what doesn’t. Just because Google says something, doesn’t mean it’s gospel truth (“guest blogging is dead,” anyone?).
That said, this doesn’t get you carte blanche to abuse link sculpting to your benefit. You always need to proceed with caution especially to restrain yourself from going overboard with this tactic.
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