Matt Cutts on PageRank sculpting

Matt Cutts recently wrote about Pagerank Sculpting on his blog. There is a lot of interesting information in the latest post, but here are the most important things to remember;

• When a page with Pagerank links to ten different pages, five of which contain the nofollow tag, only one pagerank point flows to each. This is different from about a year ago when two points would have been passed to each dofollow link.
• Not allowing comments or not allowing links in comments is not the best solution because Google likes quality links and comments can add useful keywords and keyphrases to your content. Just make sure to moderate properly and only allow relevant quality links to be posted.

However, these are direct contradictions of what he has stated in the past;

• He specifically said to either use nofollow or javascript for paid links, in order not to pass link juice.
• He specifically said that nofollowing internal links would be a good way to sculpt pagerank.

So, what are webmasters and SEO's to believe? From Cutt's latest article one might think it's better to use Javascript for non-trusted links, so they won't be counted at all and you can keep your internal pagerank. However, at the I/O conference, Google revealed that that its search engine understands some JS and that Javascript links pass both anchor text and PageRank.

Our conclusion is to keep designing websites with your users in mind. Will they benefit from having comments and links to related websites? Then by all means, include them. As Matt Cutts himself has said, nobody even noticed these changes in algorithm, so it's apparently unlikely that they have a huge impact on search ranking.