After my post last night and the many follow ups from around the SEO sphere, I (along with most observers from the world of search) strongly anticipated clarifying statements from Google's representatives at the SMX Advanced conference. Unfortunately, there's very little to report. The best I have comes from secondary sources, albeit relatively trustworthy ones:

• A large number of people queried the head of Google's web spam team, Matt Cutts, about the issue. Responses ranged from "no comment" to "the PR team would like me to stay away from that."
• Another member of Google's team noted that PageRank sculpting on unimportant pages like "register," "login," "privacy policy," etc. is OK and shouldn't hurt your site.
• A great many webmasters and SEOs are still shocked by the announcement because as recently as the last few days, they've still been seeing positive effects when employing the tactic.

The official line from yesterday that PageRank that was thought to be "conserved" by nofollowing unimportant internal links now "evaporates" rather than flowing to the remaining live links is among the most talked-about and, in my view, confusing subjects the SEO world has faced in a long time. It's very unlike Google to publicly message something in such an offhand fashion without accepting and answering questions on the subject more deeply.

This issue is compounded by many SEOs here who entirely disbelieve the messaging and think it was either a slip-up or purposeful misdirection. The evidence most frequently cited is the video Matt Cutts released only a few days prior to SMX Advanced indicating that while PR sculpting may not be the best activity, it's certainly OK to use it and you won't "evaporate" PageRank by placing a nofollowed link on your page. This video was well covered in this Huomah blog post:

Right away he talks about it being your right to do as you please with your website, including controlling “how the PageRank flows around within your site”.  For those that are still unconvinced that PR truly does flow around a site, it should clear that up for ya.

He then mentions that it “is not the first thing that I would work on”. That he would work on “getting more links” and developing “higher quality content”. That is interesting on a few levels;

1. While internal/external linking is important for your on-page SEO, one has to consider the ROI for any given SEO activity; no budget is infinite. All things NOT being equal, working on more links might be a better use of staff time.

2. Part of any modern link building/SEO program is content (creation, syndication, placement) and one should be putting these aspects fairly high in the activity pecking order.

We read about all the finer details of the SEO process all the time in this industry – but rarely do we hear about resource management. One has to think about SEO in terms of cost efficacy of an activity as there are budgetary considerations to be had.

This is excellent advice, and consistent with Google's previous messaging around link sculpting - it's not the highest ROI activity for SEO, but you should use it as you see fit and where you find benefit. The sudden change during yesterday's session has certainly caused some to question the credibility of the statement. As I noted in yesterday's post on this topic, a modification of this scale (affecting nearly 3% of all links on the web) should have had a massive impact that webmasters worldwide could feel in their site's indexation and rankings, as well as see in the toolbar PageRank update from last week. As neither of those have been reported, the new statement's credibility is in even more doubt.

To paraphrase an SEO I respect a great deal (but whose permission for attribution I didn't get):

Google is frustrated with PR sculpting and they're seeing too much of it. Thus, they're using this messaging to try to stop people from using it as much. If you're a good SEO and you know what you're doing and you run the tests, I bet it still works fine. It's just that Google wants non-advanced webmasters to stop screwing around with their link graph and stay away from excessively using nofollow in ways that hurt indexing and relevance.

I find this to be an exceptionally good insight and the argument I personally subscribe to. Just as Google's messaging about dynamic URL rewriting was overly cautious and their advice about paid links is a bit overzealous, so too is this message about link sculpting. These messages don't mean we can't rewrite dynamic URLs to be static, don't mean that we can't engage in link building that has some commercial crossover (so long as it's not direct link buying) and, most recently, don't mean that we can't sculpt with nofollow. They're simply warnings to be cautious and be aware that Google is watching these issues and worries about them - fair enough.

The last point I'll make is that, like Danny Sullivan, I worry when Google changes messaging around SEO activities and best practices. To, in his words, "lose backwards compatibility" is extremely frustrating for site owners, SEOs and everyday webmasters who only occasionally dip their toes into the SEO field. It's very simple for those SEOs who want to sculpt with nofollow to switch over to something like iFrames blocked by robots.txt (or cookie-based links or Flash or external Javascript calls, etc.) to "hide" links from Google that they show to visitors and receive the same benefits. It's also frustrating that, if true, this now means one can sabotage a competitor's SEO by adding many nofollowed links in comments or other UGC areas (by "evaporating" percentages of the PageRank that will flow).

Let's hope that clearer messages on this issue emerge soon and that they resonate with the hundreds of tests many SEOs are surely performing on this subject as I type. Inconsistency builds distrust and all of us want Google's messages to be trustworthy, even if they slip up from time to time (after all, who among us hasn't?).