What’s Sculpting PageRank you may ask, maybe your wondering what I’m talking about? Let me try explain in a moment.

As I’m sure you are aware PageRank is a Google trademarked term, it’s their measure of the importance of a page. But, if you look into it, it’s acttually more than that it is the foundation of Google’s ranking algorithm (Google PageRank). As we work with SEO it makes total sense that we make use as best we can to point PageRank in the right direction.

Most inbound links to a website will point directly to the home page, this page typically accumulates the most PageRank.  What you need to think about is how do you use this PageRank to flow deeper into your site.

One of the key things you need is site wide navigation using keyword rich text links rather than graphical buttons. You want to try shape how PageRank is distributed across your webpages using “rel=nofollow.” allowing you to send PageRank to link you want and not to others. [click to continue...]

I run a number of personal websites and I get link request e-mails on a fairly regular basis.  I’ve included a sample of an e-mail below that hit my e-mail box today.

There are very few fundamental mistakes in this e-mail, these guys will probably send out thousands of requests on a daily basis and don’t even check the websites they are requesting links from.

From:     ++++ +++++ [+++++++++@gmail.com]
To:      Webmaster
Subject:  Get Quality Home Page Link

Hello,

We visited your site http://www.++++++++++.com and are interested to swap links with your site.

We would add your link at the home page of http://giprimex.com/ which will actually help to increase the search engine rank of your site and give you some
targeted traffic too.

We’d appreciate a link back from the home/internal page of your site for
the mutual benefit.

If you are interested please reply to this email with your link details.

We look forward for your positive response.

Best regards,
++++ +++++

For starters my website does not relate to the subject, I usually don’t reply to any requests from a free e-mail account like Gmail or Hotmail etc. they say that the link will actually helped increase the search engine ranking and give me some traffic I really don’t think this will happen.

At the time of this post they have a page rank of 2, which is not a major problem as a page rank is overstated, as we’ll talk about in later posts.  I don’t do much reciprocal linking (I do some) reciprocal linking to a site that is not related in any way simply does not work in 2008.

It kind of depends on what you mean by directories is it the likes of Yahoo or is it one of the many hundreds of directories that you will find all over the web. The problem with some of these directories is nobody’s ever heard of them and they have little chance of ever being found.

So best practice comes down to the type of site you have, if its a brand-new website that has just been launched for the first-time ‘then you basically have nothing to lose and may pickup a few good links along the way but don’t expect great results.

If however you’re running a campaign for rte.ie that has good ranking then you are basically wasting your time, as there is zero value in submitting this to the 1000 directories that you can find.  I mean let’s look at rte.ie it’s a 12-year-old website (maybe older archive.org only go back to 1996) do you think a well-linked site is going to benefit from a few new links from these crappy little directories?  I don’t think this website would even benefit from a Yahoo directory listing at this stage  but that remains to be seen.

Have we asked the question?  Is there such a thing as best practices? if you have a well established site that is really well linked and ranking well then submitting to directories is going to have little effect.