Is the 'PRG-Pattern' really the new nofollow?

[NyanNyan]

Hello everybody,

today I talked to an SEO agency. The discussion was primarily about link juice and how to control it. What was mentioned directly is the PRG pattern (actually, you mask your links with post forms), so far I had read only a little bit about it, also only on several German sites, but now I would like to know what the international seo-community says about it. Is the PRG-Pattern really state of the art as I have been told by that agency?

In itself I find the concept quite interesting, but from a technical point of view it sounds a bit hacky to me, unfortunately I couldn't find any statement from Google, also most articles talk about link masking, which sounds a bit like a grey-hat to me.

What are your experiences? Do you have that pattern in use on your sites?

[goodroi]

[en.wikipedia.org...]

[NickMNS]

I get it, instead of an actual link the "link", it submits a form that in turn returns redirects to the page of the "link". So what's the point? I assume this is for internal links, because if I'm not mistaken you may run into CORS issues with external links. But what do you hope to gain by no-following internal links?

[NyanNyan]

Mainly to have control over the internal link juice, e.g. for pagerank sculpting.

[tangor]

@NyanNyan... Welcome to Webmasterworld!

Sounds a bit like snake oil to me ... Then again, I keep my "seo" pretty simple: content and taking out the bots/scrapers out to copycat and dilute my material.

[JesterMagic]

Agree with tangor and yourself, totally grey-hat.

If you are brand new to SEO (not saying you are) and don't under stand the basics then spend money on SEO to educate yourself. Or sometimes it is good to get a second opinion incase you missed something.

These type of link schemes I find rarely work or don't really affect things much (always so hard to tell).

I think your time/money would be better spent on refreshing/adding new content or pursuing backlinks (white-hat)

[nomis5]

Also sounds like snake oil to me. Keep it simple. The moment you start to believe in weird theories you are on a downward path.

[NickMNS]

Before you can start "PR sculpting" you need two things:

First, you need to understand the math of how page rank is calculated and it is not simple math, and modeling the Page rank of your site may not even be possible.
Second, you need to know how Google treats each and every link on your site, what links are ignored (if any), what links are given less weight (possibly header or footer links), this is nearly impossible to know for sure.

Given that you can't know the second point, you can't apply the math of the first point, even if you take the time to understand and then model your website. Thus "page rank sculpting" is almost certainly snake oil.