Is equity sculpting (nofollowing internal links) still worth it in 2026?

[marcus_r]

I remember equity sculpting being a thing in 2010 — nofollowing links to thin pages to concentrate PageRank on money pages. Does this still work? Should I be doing this?

[Kate M.]

The short answer: don't bother with nofollow-based equity sculpting. Since 2009 Google has been 'evaporating' the PageRank that would have flowed through nofollowed links rather than redistributing it — so you're just wasting equity, not concentrating it.

Modern best practice: use noindex on truly thin/duplicate pages (which removes them from the PageRank graph entirely), and use canonical tags for duplicate content. For concentrating equity, focus on adding more followed links from your high-PageRank pages to your targets.

[Ryan]

Just to add to what's been said — I ran into the same issue last month. The key for me was checking the crawl was set to JavaScript rendering mode. That doubled the number of links Screaming Frog found and the LinkJuice PageRank shifted noticeably for several pages.

[Kate]

One thing I'd add: even if the scores look confusing at first, sort by PageRank descending and compare the top 10 against your GA4 sessions. The correlation is usually clear. High-traffic pages should also have high internal PageRank — if they don't, you've found a real problem.