Lisa, I can clarify this section more: “People always do dumb things on their Web sites. The search engines don’t need to crawl your Contact Us page. In any normal usage, you’re not going to have to worry about it.”

Because search engines don’t mind crawling peoples’ contact pages. We were talking about PageRank sculpting and how a) it wasn’t the most important thing to work on, but b) it was similar to the fact that you decide what to link to on your front page partially based on what pages are important and should be surfaced to users/search engines. Rae asked whether you’d ever be penalized for “manipulating” PageRank within your site.

My reply was that in general folks didn’t need to worry about it. The fact is that people sometimes do control the flow of PageRank on their site to do irrelevant things (the example I gave was doorway pages). But that’s quite rare, and a normal webmaster doesn’t need to worry about the issue. And that the normal webmaster should also be more concerned with writing a great site that gets more links rather than tweaking exactly how the PageRank flows within their site.