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The professional search engine optimization community became divided in 2007 over a troublesome issue. Some people in the industry began advocating the practice of hiding internal links from search engines. This so-called PageRank sculpting, they argued, would help Websites get more pages indexed and rank better for high-value keywords. Despite the fact that several industry leaders spoke out against PageRank sculpting its adherents insisted they were helping clients improve their search referral traffic with the technique.

Over the summer of 2009 Google employees revealed for the first time that because so many Websites were hurting themselves through PageRank sculpting Google had changed the way it assesses PageRank. Now we know that PageRank sculpting caused great harm and the SEO firms that were advising their customers to use this technique were in fact causing harm to their customers’ sites. This disturbing revelation should have brought the PageRank sculpting SEOs to their senses, but instead several of the staunchest advocates continue to speak as though PageRank sculpting works and helps Websites.

When you are deciding whether to hire an SEO firm to help your Website, you should find out as soon as possible whether they use, teach, or advise their clients to engage in PageRank sculpting. If you find that an SEO firm you have approached or which has approached use favors PageRank sculpting, you should just move on. Since these people are unwilling or unable to recognize the huge mistake they made, you can do better by working with professional SEOs who don’t put client sites at risk.

Professional search engine optimization cannot afford the luxury of sacrificing client priorities for the sake of trying to prove points — especially when those points have been debunked by no less an authority than Google itself. The plain and simple truth is that PageRank sculpting has never worked as promised and people who sugar-coat it or try to argue that they now know how to do it better don’t deserve your business.

PageRank sculpting is a dangerous practice that should be left in the experimental past. Now that Google has defused the original PageRank sculpting technique, Website operators may not be so lucky if they follow the bad advice being published in favor of new PageRank sculpting ideas. Google may not be able to fix the problem a second time around.

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