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Matt Cutts’ Monday post about Google PageRank sculpting should go a long way in helping “power-SEOS” better understand the intracacies of PR sculpting and the nofollow system and figure out ways to maximize the feature’s offerings. It’s Cutts’ belief that there’s been a somewhat expected misconception about nofollow links since Google changed the way they analyze links, and he’s made it his mission to straighten everything out for the betterment of everybody else.

You can read the full post by clicking here, but the gist of it can be read here:

“So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.”

Basically, where the equation used to read “PR Passed = Total PR/(# of Nofollowed Links)” it now reads “PR Passed = Total PR/(# of Total Links).” If your site had 100 points of PageRank, 2 followed links and 2 nofollowed links a year ago, you’ll now have only 50 points of PageRank, as the other 50 points will have been split up evenly over all four links (giving 50 to the 2 nofollowed, which don’t get credited).

Take note that Google changed this system over a year ago, so by now webmasters are only put in a better position to actually help their PageRank than they were yesterday. This isn’t anything new, so if your site’s ranking didn’t face any serious declines a year ago it’s not going to start suffering now.