Leaking Google Juice to Non-contributing User Profile Pages

[CalicoMonkey]

I realize, as we all do, that content is king if you want to have any realistic hope of ranking well for appropriate key phrases. If I have a site with thousands of users am I correct in thinking that I'm leaking Google Juice if I link to users that do not contribute? I'm considering a combination of removing those users from the sitemap or even the more drastic nofollow approach.

Basically, the pages of these users have no content, but they're still legitimate users. Should I ask the search engines to ignore them?

[tedster]

You're talking about this idea of Sculpting PageRank [webmasterworld.com]. But it seems to be a lot less straightforward than we might hope, especially if those pages are already indexed. They all have some nav links to other pages in your site, right? So they are still circulating page rank onward to the rest of your site.

We've had several reports here of people trying to sculpt Page Rank for their site and making things worse, not better. I'd be very cautious about this idea.

[CalicoMonkey]

Thank you for the link, that is indeed what I was referring to. I wasn't aware that the premise had been given the designation of "sculpting", but it does make sense.

In addition to the possible detriment, it can also be a good deal of effort to implement such ideas if the site is particularly large. You're likely right that it's best to leave it alone.

[annej]

I just read the linked MC interview [stonetemple.com...] and I'm still not clear on one thing. If I noindex and nofollow a page does that mean no link juice will go to the page? It seemed like he indicated it would.

I'm not big on doing much sculpting but I have noindex and nofollow my newsletter, search page, contact page and such. I don't really see any need for them to be indexed as they are really of no use except to my visitors. Yet they are linked to from most of the pages on my site. So I don't want to throw away all the link juice to pages that are not useful to have rank in a search engine.

BUT here is my big question. If I did take the noindex etc off of them they do have a few links back to important pages on my site. So since these pages would get the link juice back I'm wondering if it really makes any difference if I do the noindex & nofollow or not.

[tedster]

There definitely seem to be some fuzzy areas, the so-called "edge cases". Google's official webmaster blog released a new video from Matt today. Its title is "Remove your content from Google", but it covers some of the areas we're discussing.

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]