If you view the general Google Algorithm for determining PageRank in their patent application, you see that the PageRank of a given page is (by and large) determined by the number of links pointing to it. What also become apparent if you dig a bit deeper, is that that amount of PageRank “juice” that gets passed along to any page through a link is inversely proportional to the total number of links on the page containing the link.

While you can’t do much about the links on someone else’s site, you can at least ensure that within your own site, you’re not “wasting” link juice. If you think you’re not, just look at on how many pages on your site you have links to sections like “Privacy Policy” and “Contact me” and maybe “About us”. Chances are, that when you look at your SEO goals, you haven’t given a top priority to these pages – and yet by linking to them, you’re lowering the value of other links to more important pages – like category pages or product pages. Oops.

So what can you do? The answer is simple – just “nofollow” all links to pages which you’re really not interested in ranking. This small amount of “sculpting” will help you just a little in improving the overall PageRank of your site for sections that matter. And a little bit of this and that is just what you need.

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