Comments on: The Purported Death of PageRank Sculpting

By: Ed

Ed — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:57:04 +0000

Thanks for the reply and details Leslie I will seriously consider SEO brina turst membership. So the advice you gave about combining overhead pages into one page in stomping the search engines 2 in stompernet is now not relevant (let’s leave the whole PR sculpting issue aside)?.
As far as the 10 similar sites, a mini network seems to be what Brad Fallon has done with myweddingfavors, cornerstorkbabygifts, toocutebabygifts but checking the ips these sites are all on different ips.

By: Leslie

Leslie — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:59:51 +0000

As I write this we are tweaking our marketing funnel for The SEO BrainTrust, but there is a page you can go to order. There are two options, a lower touch membership at $97/month and the full membership at $297/month: http://seobraintrust.com/videooffer.html.
In terms of your multiple domains, hosting should cost you more like $2/month, not $10, and the domain name itself is a very small part of ranking so the keyword rich domain names are really not getting you all that much to start with. Finally, it is not clear to me that 10 different feeder sites pointing at your money site is a very good thing to do even with unique content unless these sites also link to enough other domains that the linking arrangement is not viewed as simply a game.
Plus, keep in mind that the ranking benefit of one of these sites made 10 times bigger is very much the same as the 10 smaller sites you describe especially when they are all hosted at the same IP and are clearly related to a single money site.
What you are describing is a classic mini-net strategy and while variations on that approach still do have application, most of the simple cases are too easy for Google to detect to be worthwhile.

By: Ed

Ed — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:44:46 +0000

OK thanks for the info about the pagerank graph, it would only work then for combining overhead pages, but not affect page rank scuplting? I’ll have to fish out some JS info seobraintrust on the proper way to do this (by the way how can I become a member-it doesn’t seem to be taking new members?!)

As far as why I have the different domains is because they are domains with variations on the keywords that I have found in my keyword research “buykeyword.com” “citykeyword.com” etc. I want to make the ten sites blogs/article sites and put unique content on each of them with natural links in the content (either manually created articles or I am presently checking out some software at the moment to spunn articles). I just don’t fancy having to spend US$10 per month on hosting packages for each domain. What do you think of this as (a small part of-maybe 10%) a linkbuilding campaign? If I have 10 sites and they have one link to the money site a week then that will be 520 links which must be worth something?! Thanks

By: Leslie

Leslie — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 02:46:45 +0000

First question, no, this should not work. The PageRank graph is computed over the space of document IDs, not URLs, and the examples you use all reference the same document.

As to your other question, the answer varies tremendously based on why you are doing this in the first place. If you would be concerned if Google found out, then yes, different IPs and whois info, but look carefully at why you are doing that. In all but a very few (highly competitive) markets, this is not the best way to build sustainable traffic.

The best reason to do this “in the old days” was to reuse content across multiple domains without the reuse appearing as the obvious search-engine-spam it very obviously was. Now, content is so cheap and the spam filters so much smarter (but by no means perfect) that it is almost always better to just build more content.

By: Ed

Ed — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:12:15 +0000

Thanks for clearing that up Leslie. I assume that your Named Anchor Technique will also work as well as your JS solutions?
aboutus.html
about.html#contact
about.html#privacy
about.html#terms

Quick off topic question please, I have 10 domains I am going to use for links to point towards my money site. What should I do, have seperate IP addresses for them all, or can I host them on the same server? I’m on a shoestring budget! Thank you very much

By: Leslie

Leslie — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:55:31 +0000

PageRank Sculpting is unchanged, just the way we do it maybe has. Using nofollow, which is by far the simplest method, is now open to question (experiments frankly differ in their outcomes) so rolling back to the Javascript techniques I introduced in 2003 starts to make sense again — as tedious and error prone as they are.

By: Ed Wickes

Ed Wickes — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:47:38 +0000

What is the latest on this, is this still correct? Page PR sculpting is still working? (Feb2010). At least it isn;t going to do any harm I imagine.

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:12:10 +0000

We still don’t know what is happening on the other end, the dampening.
July last year there were some changes I saw on some tag pages which could be related or just confused data enough not to see anything.
With big sites, there are a lot of pages in the index, so if G is redistributing, they catch more juice.

Need to write something about domain level dampening as an alternative to domain authority theories.

I am intrigued by Pebble