Page Rank Sculpting - To sculpt or not to sculpt?

Page Rank Sculpting is something that I've not actively practised but have heard many other professional SEO practitioners swear by, so I was very interested when I came across this article by the inimitable Matt Cutts.

Page Rank Sculpting is the practice of manipulating links within your website to try to ensure that important pages have a higher Page Rank than less important pages. Matt uses this diagram to demonstrate the perceived wisdom of how Page Rank cascades down through a website:

This can be controlled by using the "nofollow" tag to exclude less important pages from this PR distribution, therefore distributing that precious PR to the key pages only. In theory this sounds great and although Matt makes it clear that it's not quite as simple as that, should we not all be doing this? Here's his advice - should you Page Rank Sculpt?:

I wouldn’t recommend it, because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.

This really reinforces my own personal approach to SEO. There are lots of little tips and techniques out there to help improve a site's ranking but at the end of the day it comes down to the fact that the most important things are building the site in the most logical, search engine-friendly way possible and writing original, high quality content that people will want to read and link to.

Damn, that's not very catchy is it? Perhaps I need a quirky 2 word phrase to describe it... any ideas?