I just dont get Sculpting Page Rank and Matt Cutts interview

[flanok]

Hi,

There has been a lot of talk recently about using the nofollow tag links, to pages that are of less importance, so there is more page rank delivered to pages that are more important.

Here is an interview with Matt talking about it.

[stonetemple.com...]

But I dont get it.
Yes it is true that if you restrict your outgoing links, the link left will deliver more PR to the receiving pages.

The bit I dont get is this.

There are now less pages than before. OK, they deliver a bit more PR, but what is the difference of having more pages with a bit less PR, than less pages with a bit more PR.

For example: My "About" page has a PR of 4, because of the internal links to it. I could restrict the links to this page, to send PR elsewhere but I would lose a PR 4 page, that links to other internal pages including my homepage.

I may not be losing, but I dont see where I am gaining.

More PR = Less Pages
Less Pages = More PR.

Please help me on this.

Mark

[ecmedia]

You have to really answer this question yourself. Would you be better off with a PR4 about us page or a fraction of extra PR on other pages?

I have dealt with this question myself and my conclusion is that this idea makes sense for pages being created now rather than pages that have been around for years and have high PR. Like you many of us have high PR of contact us, about us, privacy policy, etc because these pages were linked from almost every pages on the site.

[glengara]

The cynical view might be that MC is using our greed for PR to make the nofollow more acceptable, were I to "sculpt" internal PR it would not be through using that attribute....