SEO Community Divided over Failed PageRank Sculpting Idea

PageRank sculpting — have you ever heard of it? This is one of the worst ideas to come out of the search engine optimization community in years. Debunked by many leading experts in the field, PageRank sculpting nonetheless gained in popularity over the past few years because enough SEOs who don’t understand how to analyze search results kept repeating false claims that PageRank sculpting was working for them. When challenged by other SEOs to prove their claims, the PageRank sculptors were unable to do so.

And when Google itself finally told the SEO community to stop sculpting PageRank in the middle of 2009 many SEOs simply chose to ignore the search engine. Google admitted it had changed the way it handles link value as far back as 2007 because PageRank sculpting was hurting Websites. And yet the PageRank sculptors never realized that their cheap linking tricks weren’t having any effect on the search results. Some of the arguments against PageRank sculpting made very cogent points but even these voices of reason have been ignored.

What we can say with complete certainty is that Google employees have been advising people NOT to try to use PageRank sculpting as far back as 2007. Despite the hints from Googlers that PageRank sculpting might not be good for Websites, SEOs who should have known better continued to abuse this bad practice. PageRank sculpting was in reality only covering up bad Website design with even worse Website design. Not one of the advocates of PageRank has ever been able to show that any Website has benefitted from PageRank sculpting.

Some very bad attempts to prove that PageRank sculpting works have been widely criticized and debunked. Nonetheless the PageRank sculptors have persevered. There is no knowing how much money they have cost their clients in lost search rankings and visibility. You can be sure that anyone who is still practicing PageRank sculpting today is not a very good SEO. If they are going to ignore even Google and try to improve search results by blocking crawlers from finding certain pages on sites, they deserve to lose the rankings they have worked so hard for.

Although less radical methods for sculpting PageRank are now being promoted the would-be sculptors still have no way of measuring real PageRank so they don’t know if or when or how their changes take effect. These people are shooting in the dark, practicing very untrustworthy search engine optimization. The best SEOs in the field advise people to NOT try to sculpt PageRank. It is a false idea that cannot work.

Naveen Jain: Infotech Maverick

In the fiercely competitive world of info-technology, it takes a certain buoyancy to stand out from the masses. Naveen Jain is definitely one of the prominent figures in the industry; he founded two industry mavericks, InfoSpace in 1996 and Intelius in 2003. Naveen Jain is also a devoted philanthropist with an enviable track record. Charities that received donations from the entrepreneur include the University of Washington, United Way, Child Rights and You India, and the Seattle Children’s Hospital. He is particularly supportive of Washington-based groups working to relieve hunger, child needs, healthcare, and education. Founded in March 1996, InfoSpace rose to prominence during the decade’s dotcom explosion as a content provider. In its heyday, it supplied horoscopes, stock quotes, telephone directories, and address books to such websites as AOL, Lycos, and the MSN Network. Another Jain company, Intellius, started in January 2003. With the help of Microsoft acquaintances, Naveen Jain fashioned the startup as an information services venture. It leverages public records, insofar as they can make Intelius perform background checks on people, guard against identity theft, screen inauspicious employees, and so forth. IDWatch, an Intelius product, was the Product of The Year in the 2006 WSA Industry Achievement Awards. The company itself won the Stevie for Best New Company in 2006, the Stevie nomination for Most Innovative Company in 2007, and the CODIiE nomination for Best Online Consumer Service in 2007. Topping it all, ,a href=”http://naveenjainblog.com/”>Intelius CEO Naveen Jain twice made it to the finals of the annual Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards. Earlier, he was honored an Albert Einstein Technology medalist and included in Red Herring’s feted list of Top 20 Entrepreneurs. Information Week even recognized him as one of the “People Who Will Change the Net.” Naveen Jain is a former Microsoft Corp. project manager. He was part of the team that worked on the forerunner of The Microsoft Network, the company’s online service. He was born and raised in India.