BAM! Did you hear that? SEO expert Michael Martinez just fired a shot across the bow of half the SEO community. Taking on the controversial subject of PageRank sculpting, Martinez leaves no room for doubt about where he stands on the debate. “If I were one of your clients who had taken your advice to sculpt PageRank,” he writes, “and if you had not come back to me and advised me to take down the ‘nofollow’ attributes I’d be suing you right now.” Those are strong words.

PageRank sculpting is one of those SEO tricks that caught on quickly despite powerful objections from people like Adam Audette and Shari Thurow, two of the leading SEO pundits. Audette’s PageRank sculpting antithesis is considered one of the best responses to the PageRank sculpting movement. Thurow wrote in her PageRank sculpting article “this entire PageRank sculpting is a slippery slope of giving spiders different content than site visitors. Search engines want what users want….”

The controversy has been raging since 2007 when a small number of SEOs claimed they had improved search rankings and visibility for clients by using the “rel=’nofollow’” link attribute to block crawlers from accessing “less important” pages on those sites. Martinez and other critics responded by pointing out that since no one can accurately measure and record PageRank there is no way to map its flow through a Website. Google employees like Matt Cutts and Adam Lasnik advised people in cautious language to use other SEO methods to improve search results.

Unfortunately, the PageRank Sculpting movement took on a life of its own and in the summer of 2009 Google revealed that it had been evaporating the PageRank that SEOs thought they were sculpting for over a year. All the proponents of PageRank Sculpting were left looking foolish because they had claimed many times that their tests proved their ideas were effective. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. Any improvements that client sites experienced in the search results happened IN SPITE of the SEOs’ work.

Over the past few years a handful of high profile people have attacked the credibility of the SEO industry, calling them scam artists, snake oil salesman, and worse. The steadfast belief in the holiness of PageRank Sculpting threatens to make those accusations ring true, and Martinez says he is ready to line up with the critics if the SEO community doesn’t stop peddling nonsense. Make no mistake about it: this latest round in the PageRank Sculpting debate delivers a 1-2 knockout to the pro-Sculpting community. But will they get the message or will they continue giving SEO a bad name?