Email startup ReMail announced this afternoon that it’s been acquired by Google and there’s a pretty interesting story behind this cool technology that could inspire future developments in Gmail.

The news was announced by ReMail CEo Gabor Cselle on his blog today (we learned about it first via CenterNetworks). Gabor was a former Gmail intern and was YCombinator funded. There are even more interesting elements to this story than that, though.

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ReMail the app has already been discontinued from the iTunes App Store, but here are some ways it could impact Gmail in the future anyway. Cselle will now become a product manager on Gmail. The core feature of ReMail was full-text search of all the emails in your Gmail or other online inbox, even when you were offline. That wasn’t the only cool thing about ReMail, though.

1. The Reboxed application that sorts your contacts by priority was really interesting. It was like a little game that scrolled through your contacts, displayed two at a time and asked you to prioritize one over the other. Your individual ratings and the aggregate ratings of particular email contacts across all ReBoxed users were then used to bring emails from high-priority senders to the top of your inbox. It was a really fun little feature. While many data-centric startups would have just picked up email prioritization based on implicit behavior (whose emails you open and reply to) there was something to be said for allowing explicit rankings in a game-like setting. Whose emails are more important to you, your boss’s or your mom’s?
   
2. That Google just bought something that’s all about one of the iPhone’s core functions, email, is interesting. Sure, the app is shuttered now, but imagine if Apple had decided to buy ReMail instead. If Cselle was working on the iPhone’s native email application, that would have been better for Apple than this may turn out to be if he helps make Android’s email the best in the mobile world.
3. ReMail’s founder was previously a VP of Engineering at the very ambitious Outlook plug-in provider Xobni. He left Xobni and ended up creating something very different. Cselle says he had a “multi-step plan for global email domination” but received advice “that instead I should build something small, simple, and useful.” The end result? “It worked,” he says.
4. The man that gave him that advice and invested in his company, was Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail.
5. Finally, Google just acquired a native mobile app, built on another platform. Much has been made of Google’s emphasis on moving everything to HTML5 and the mobile web. But here’s evidence that you can build an innovative application in an entirely different direction and still capture the company’s eye. (Admittedly it probably helps to be super connected like Cselle was.)

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For those of you using advanced SEO techniques such as PageRank sculpting, you might want to listen up.

Head of Google’s crime spam fighting team, Matt Cutts, put the cat amongst the pigeons last month when he answered an audience question at the SMX Advanced conference about the value of using rel=”no follow” for PageRank sculpting purposes. When asked if it was a good idea to use nofollow when linking around within your site, Matt said no.

NoFollow is a method to annotate a link to say to search engines “I don’t want to vouch for this link.” In Google, nofollow links don’t pass PageRank.

According to Matt, more than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that links WITHOUT nofollow would flow lesser points of PageRank than before and that links WITH the nofollow attribute would count toward how PageRank is divided up amongst all links on a page.

Seems SEOs and webmasters were getting a little bit trigger happy with their use of rel=”no follow” for Google crawl prioritization and were accidently blocking Googlebot from indexing important parts of their site.

Matt later clarified the issue with his blog post PageRank Sculpting:

“[We] noticed some sites that attempted to change how PageRank flowed within their sites, but those sites ended up excluding sections of their site that had high-quality information (e.g. user forums)… I wouldn’t recommend [PageRank sculpting], 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. For example, it makes a much bigger difference to make sure that people (and bots) can reach the pages on your site by clicking links than it ever did to sculpt PageRank. “

Danny Sullivan has a great follow up post that goes into more detail here.

So the short story is this: PageRank sculpting is no longer effective as a SEO technique (if it ever was). For the most part, the more links on a page, the less PageRank each link gets. Keep that in mind whenever you’re optimizing your site and when you build new pages.

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Google PageRank Sculpting is Dead