30-second summary:
- SEO strategists focused on link building often forget that it’s much easier to optimize their existing link equity than it is to build more.
- Large enterprise and ecommerce websites with thousands of landing pages often spread PageRank too thin, sending link equity to pages that are unlikely to ever rank.
- SEO strategists can achieve dramatic ranking improvements by changing the internal linking profile of their websites to concentrate more PageRank on their highest-value landing pages.
- An iterative approach to internal link edits with a crawler, A/B testing, and site rollbacks allows webmasters to make adjustments until they get their PageRank distribution right.
Over the past decade, some SEOs have loudly proclaimed that the art of PageRank sculpting is dead. As is often true when armchair technologists voice their opinions with clickbait headlines, they got it dead wrong[1]. In fact, the larger the site and the more PageRank it has, the more effective PageRank sculpting can be.
PageRank-driven link algorithms are Google’s original authority metrics. They are still the fundamental basis for how authority is evaluated on a per-page and per-domain basis. PageRank even underlies the PA/DA metrics from Moz and UR/DR from Ahrefs. Google uses its PageRank algorithms[2] to separate the signal from the noise in its massive 30 trillion page index and provide high-quality search results.
Call me a traditionalist, but one of the reasons I love experimenting with PageRank is because it is an onsite strategy[3] that I have 100% control over. Earning new links is great, but it’s time-consuming work. Maximizing the value of my existing links is much easier than building new ones. For websites with large existing backlink profiles, it’s often more immediately impactful.
Not trying to use PageRank to