This post will explore several arguments against using nofollow for internal PageRank™ sculpting. It is based on a presentation I did at SMX Advanced. You can view my presentation slides here, however the deck is very brief since I only had about 10 minutes to present my position. The bulk of the discussion is treated in this post.

Summary of My Position

Sculpting PageRank™ with nofollow is not going away. Limited use of nofollow is recommended. However, widespread use of the technique is usually a bad idea. I recommend slowing it down.

Nofollow sculpting is a tool to raise search rankings by distributing PageRank™ flow internally. However, PageRank™ is a patented, secret algorithm designed by Google that we can …

This article will explore the basic concepts of designing optimized site architectures for efficient spidering by search engines. Building an easily spidered site has ramifications in how pages, sections of a site, and entire domains are topically understood and categorized by bots, which influences indexing and rankings.

While search engine optimization concerns are the focus here, there are many different applications of information architecture (IA) that go beyond search engines. IA overlaps with several other disciplines, including navigability, user experience, and interface design. It’s very hard to speak categorically about this subject, because how IA is applied to a site is based largely on business goals, the site infrastructure, user testing, and the whims of the people involved (for real).

At its …