PR Sculpting Question

[Karma]

I've been playing about with PR sculpting on my site and have a query.

In a nut-shell, I have 3 levels on my site:

[1st] homepage with a-z links (EG visitor selects letter G)
[2nd] listing of widgets starting with the letter G (EG they select "G"rey widgets)
[3rd] Grey widget information

The 2nd level pages (widgets starting with the letter G) all have significant PR. The sole reason for their existence is to link to the 3rd level pages.

If I added the rel="nofollow" from the homepage to the 2nd level (a-z) pages would:

a) The search engines still crawl/index through these pages to the lowest (3rd) detail level?
b) PR still flow through from the homepage to the 3rd level?

[edited by: Karma at 6:47 pm (utc) on April 21, 2009]

[Karma]

Anyone able to help?

[peterdaly]

Unless L1 links to L3 through some other path, no, PR won't flow to L3 if you nofollow the links to L2.

[anallawalla]

In the context of PR sculpting, you would mainly nofollow a page that you don't want to appear in a search result (e.g. privacy, contact form). The rest are clean links, including the level 2 as peterdaly explained. If the site looks like an inverted pyramid then you are doing the right thing.

You should consider the level 2 anchor text (underlined here) - would [u]Grey widgets[/u] be a meaningful (i.e. people search for this?) anchor text? Then that would be better than [u]G[/u]rey widgets.

Once you are on the level 3 page, check where your internal links go. If they only go back to level 2 and Home, then you are giving Home a big dose of internal link juice.

[Karma]

Thanks.

In this instance, I don't want the level 2 pages in the search results, as people don't search for widgets starting with the letter A-Z.

There are links to the homepage and level 2 pages (a-z) embedded in the actual template so they're on every single page.