SMX Advanced – Google Cause Controversy Once Again

June 12, 2009
by Andy Heaps

One of the most popular conferences on the SEO circuit is taking place this week – SMX advanced in Seattle. Day 1 has already raised a few eyebrows amongst the search community on the twittersphere and blogosphere, mainly focussed around 2 topics covered by Google’s top spam dog Matt Cutts.

PageRank Sculpting

Firstly, the now apparently invalid technique of PageRank sculpting. To give you a bit of background – this phrase and SEO technique was first coined back in 2007 and is the idea of applying nofollow tags on internal links to unimportant pages of your website, enabling key pages of your website get the maximum benefit from internal ‘link juice’. So, webmasters around the world went away in their thousands and started adding nofollow tags to links to login pages, T’s and C’s pages and other pages that would serve no purpose being indexed.

However, Matt Cutts yesterday explained on his ‘You&A’ panel that this technique is no longer effective. Danny Sullivan used a nice analogy to explain it: “Imagine authority is money, and a particular page has $10 in ‘authority’ to spend. It links out to 10 pages, so each of those pages gets $1 ($10 divided by 10). If it links to 20 pages, each gets 50 cents ($10 divided by 20). If it links to 5 pages, each page gets $2”.

So, should you undo all your PageRank sculpting work? No. While apparently ineffective it’s not a risk to your website’s Google rankings.

JavaScript Links

This on the other hand is a completely different kettle of fish. First mentioned at Google’s I/O conference a few days ago and debated heavily ever since, JavaScript links now pass PageRank and anchor text in Google. Why is this such a big deal? Well, not only are Google back-tracking on previous guidelines, but they are implying that those websites that have followed these guidelines to date are now at risk of suffering penalisation if they don’t make appropriate changes.

In their attempt to eradicate paid links, Google stated in their guidelines that any paid-for advertising must not be implemented in such a way that it will directly impact your website’s rankings. I.e. links must be implemented using one or more of the following techniques:

Nofollowing all advertising links
Blocking the landing page from being indexed via robots.txt
Redirecting through a 3rd party URL
Linking via JavaScript.

Note the last point. Having paid-for advertising on other websites that links to your site via JavaScript can now pass PageRank and therefore influence your rankings. So, should you change all those JavaScript links used for your banner campaigns, affiliate campaigns etc.? According to Google, yes. Such links may now be seen as paid links thus contravening their guidelines and potentially risking penalisation.

I agree with Danny Sullivan – Google needs to keep getting better to stay ahead of the competition. However enforcing potentially difficult, expensive, time consuming changes on people who have so far gone out of their way to do everything by the Google book doesn’t seem a particularly fair way to go about it.

If there’s one thing to be said for SEO it’s never dull!

Further SMX Advanced (day 1) commentary: http://searchengineland.com/smx-advanced-day-1-live-blogging-coverage-20386 .

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