Internal link sculpting is the practice of controlling how ranking value flows between a site's own pages, so that more of it reaches the pages the site most wants to rank. The term covers two very different tactics, and confusing them is the source of most bad advice on the subject.

  • PageRank sculpting, the original meaning, used rel="nofollow" on internal links (to pages such as "About", "Contact" or "Terms") so that, in theory, the value those links would have carried was redirected to the remaining followed links. This stopped working by 2009 [1].
  • Internal link prioritization, the meaning that still works, is choosing which pages to link, from where and how often. Linking a best-selling product from the home page is sculpting in this sense, and Google recommends it [2].

Search Insider uses "internal link sculpting" for the whole idea and is explicit about which version is meant, because one is dead and the other is ordinary good site architecture.

How did PageRank sculpting work?

PageRank sculpting worked on the assumption that a page's PageRank was split only among its followed links, so nofollowing some links would give the others a larger share. Matt Cutts of Google described the logic with an example: a page with "ten PageRank points" and ten outgoing links, five of them nofollowed [1].

ModelPoints passed per followed linkPoints passed through nofollowed linksTotal passed on
What sculptors assumed (the old model)2010
How Google changed it (2008)10, the share is lost5

Under the old model, nofollowing five links doubled the value of the other five. Under the change, Cutts said, "Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each" [1]. The nofollowed links still count when the value is divided. Their share simply goes nowhere.

Does PageRank sculpting with nofollow still work?

No. PageRank sculpting with nofollow has not worked since Google changed how nofollowed links are counted, a change made in 2008 and disclosed by Matt Cutts on June 15, 2009 [1]. Adding nofollow to an internal link does not concentrate ranking value on the remaining links. It throws away the nofollowed link's share.

That makes nofollow on internal links worse than doing nothing. A followed link to the "About" page at least passes value to a page on the same site, which can pass it on again through its own links. A nofollowed one passes nothing to anyone.

Google gave a reason for the change. Cutts wrote that Google's crawl, indexing and quality teams "noticed some sites that attempted to change how PageRank flowed within their sites, but those sites ended up excluding sections of their site that had high-quality information (e.g. user forums)" [1]. Sculpting was hiding good pages from Google, so Google removed the reward for it.

Internal linking is every link between pages on the same site, while internal link sculpting is internal linking done with the specific goal of shifting ranking value toward chosen pages. Good internal linking is always welcome. Sculpting is only legitimate when it works by adding or arranging real links for real reasons, not by hiding links from search engines.

Google's own guidance describes the legitimate version. Google says that "as a general rule, the more links a page has to it within a site, the higher the relative importance of the page", and that it uses "the number of links it needs to follow to reach a page and the number of links to a page" to infer importance [2]. For a best seller, Google suggests linking to it "from the home page or in other content, such as blog posts or newsletters" [2]. That is sculpting by addition, and it is the version Search Insider recommends.

You can use nofollow on internal links, but not to sculpt ranking value. There are two narrow cases where it is reasonable:

  • Pages that are different for every user. In the same 2009 post, Cutts said there "may be a miniscule number of pages (such as links to a shopping cart or to a login page)" where he might add nofollow, because those pages are not useful in search [1].
  • Faceted navigation, for crawl control. Google's faceted navigation guidance says nofollow on links to filtered results pages "may be beneficial", but only if every link pointing to that URL carries it, and calls nofollow and canonical tags "generally less effective in the long term" than blocking filter URLs in robots.txt or moving filters into URL fragments [4].

Both are about crawling and usefulness, not about channeling PageRank. To keep a page out of search results, use a noindex tag rather than nofollowing the links to it [6]. Since 2019, Google has also treated nofollow as a hint rather than a strict rule, so nofollow is not a reliable control either way. See nofollow link for that history.

Hiding internal links with JavaScript or other tricks is not a reliable way to sculpt, and Search Insider does not recommend it. When Cutts announced the end of nofollow sculpting, commenters on his post immediately raised "flash, form, and script-based hacks" as alternatives [1]. The tactic has two problems.

First, Google may or may not follow such links. Google says it can "generally" only crawl a link that is an <a> element with an href attribute, and that it "can't reliably extract URLs" from script events [3]. Google also renders JavaScript, so a link that becomes a normal <a href> after rendering is just a link. The outcome is unpredictable in both directions.

Second, it repeats the exact mistake Google changed the rules to stop: making parts of a site harder to reach. Pages linked only through hidden links lose discovery and internal links, which is the opposite of what a site wants for anything worth indexing.

PageRank sculpting stopped working when Google changed how nofollowed links divide PageRank in 2008, which Matt Cutts made public in June 2009. Since then, Google's advice has been to let value flow and to prioritize pages through site structure instead.

2008: the quiet change

Google changed how PageRank flows through pages with nofollowed links. Cutts later wrote that this happened "more than a year ago" from the date of his June 2009 post [1].

June 15, 2009: Matt Cutts explains the change

Cutts published the explanation and the advice that followed from it: "In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site" [1]. He named the first-order priorities as "making great content that will attract links in the first place" and "choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike" [1].

Today: PageRank evolved, the advice did not

Google says PageRank was one of its core ranking systems at launch and that it "has evolved a lot since then, and it continues to be part of our core ranking systems" [5]. Google does not publish how value flows between internal links today, so the 2009 arithmetic is a model of the principle, not a current formula.

Internal link sculpting by addition is worth doing, and sculpting by hiding links is not. Search Insider's view is that the remaining value in "sculpting" lies almost entirely in two decisions: which pages get links from the home page, navigation and hub pages, and which pages are kept within a few clicks of them.

The honest limit: there is no published measurement of how much ranking value a single internal link passes, and Google's PageRank has changed since the 2009 example [5]. Anyone quoting a percentage gain from re-arranging internal links is guessing. What Google does state is directional: more internal links and fewer clicks from the home page signal more importance [2].

Removing links can also help, if it helps people. A footer or mega-menu with hundreds of links splits attention and value across pages that do not need it. Google says there is "no magical ideal number of links" on a page, but "if you think it's too much, then it probably is" [3].

What should you do instead of PageRank sculpting?

Instead of PageRank sculpting, strengthen the pages that matter by linking to them more, and from better places. A practical checklist:

  • Remove nofollow from internal links added for sculpting. It wastes value [1].
  • Link priority pages from the home page and main navigation, as Google suggests for best sellers [2].
  • Link categories to every product or article in them, so nothing depends on a search box to be found [2].
  • Add contextual links from popular articles to the pages you most want to rank, with descriptive anchor text [3].
  • Use noindex, not nofollow, for pages that should stay out of search results [6].
  • Check click depth and orphan pages after any navigation change, since cutting links to sculpt can strand pages.