At the current SMX Advanced conference (it’s in Seattle) Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan held a session called You&A which takes audience questions.
I first read a transcript of this in the aimClear blog called Is What’s Good for Google Good for SEO? (Kudos to them for the good coverage of the session).
The big bombshell in this is the fact that Cutts replied to a question about the fact that Google no longer appear to support Page Rank sculpting.
Here’s a simple explanation of what Matt said from SE Roundtable where they also point out that he didn’t mention this a few days ago in one of his videos.
So of course there are a lot of blogs out there today e.g. Page rank Sculpting is Dead and how this changes something that previously worked which is not backwards compatible, something that is a change for Google, who usually make advances that built on the success of earlier ones rather than throw them out of the window.
I’ve certainly seen some extreme cases of sculpting used on websites. We tend to use it as a light touch, and in fact, given the ‘new’ way this is supposedly working, our current usage will probably be nearly as much of a benefit as it was before, being used to devalue pages we don’t want to rank rather than inflate others (although that was a nice side effect).
So has the change been implemented because it works too well? Perhaps. Or have the SEO world over-reacted to something just because Matt Cutts said it? Only time will tell.
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