Better PageRank Sculpting

[AlmostHuman]

I noticed that some pages on my website that shouldn't even be in Google Index have higher PR that the home page. Sometime ago I forgot to block them and now that's what I have.

I realized that I didn't pay much attention to things like PR Sculpting and now I have a few questions:

1. Is making links work through JavaScript still a good way not to pass any link juice from one page to another? As far as I know, making them "nofollow" still dissipates the link juice (official Google Source)

[searchengineland.com...]

2. Is there a way to automate such calculations of the juice flow among the pages of a website?

[turbocharged]

Pagerank has not been updated in half a year and the pipeline they use to perform toolbar exports is broke as is noted in this thread [webmasterworld.com]. As a result, the pr values you see are quite old and may not accurately reflect the true pr of your pages.

You are correct in that using nofollow on internal links does not prevent the flow of pr.

Instead of using javascript, you may want to consider building content around your prized pages to give them greater importance within your website. I can see where excessive use of javascript can lead to problems.

[buckworks]

My opinion: add noindex to the pages that you want out of the SERPs, but allow whatever PR you've got to flow freely within your site.

When you're wanting to sculpt PR, think more in terms of digging new/deeper channels for it to flow, and less in terms of trying to block it.

Give thought to how PR could be directed to flow -out- from pages which accumulate higher-than-average PR. Those can be useful hubs for linking to pages you want to boost. Adding extra links here and there is a much more natural way to boost strategic pages than trying to manipulate PR with nofollow, javascript etc.

Consider using a different template for highly-linked pages such as the privacy policy or contact info. On pages which get lots of links but few visits, a trimmed-down version of the site navigation might direct their outgoing PR more advantageously.

Examine your templates for redundant links that could be trimmed sitewide. I've seen many footers that merely duplicate links that already appeared earlier on the page. I'm not sure what that does to the PR calculations but I don't think it's A Good Thing. Maybe a single "Back to Top" link would be just as useful.

Side comment: Make sure that robots.txt doesn't block your noindexed pages. The spiders need to be able to read the fact that you want them noindexed!