Hi Nick,

My hart goes out to you and your company for having to deal with this. However I do believe that you should use a 302  redirect along with a no flow  just to be certain. Here's some more information.

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/11285/SEO-Are-Nofollow-Links-Still-Valuable.aspx

http://moz.com/blog/nofollow-is-dying-the-impact-of-microblogging-and-nofollow-on-seo

Google lists the three main intended uses of nofollow as:

1. Linking to untrusted content
2. Paid links
3. Crawl prioritisation (typically linking to yourself with nofollow)

Leaving aside for a second the ability / likelihood of webmasters using nofollow correctly (which means that the search engines need to work even with broken implementations just as they often rank HTML code that doesn't validate), there are two big uses of nofollow that are breaking the model:

1. Complete "silo-isation" of large sites
2. Domain owner not trusting trusted content authors' links

"Silo-isation"

Disregarding the fact that I just made that word up, there is a very real trend of powerful sites nofollowing all (or nearly all) outbound links even though they are the very definition of editorial links. The site owners have presumably seen the ranking power achieved by Wikipedia nofollowing all outbound links and are trying to form their very own black hole.

Lack of trust

My understanding of the original intent of proffering nofollow as a solution to the problem of linking to untrusted places was that it was mainly intended for situations like blog comments, profile links, etc., where users of your site could create links to wherever they pleased.

This is definitely valuable (as anyone who has ever had to moderate blog comments can attest) but what about once you do trust the commenter? Since so many sites have no mechanism whereby that nofollow is ever removed, we end up in a situation where people are creating huge amounts of really valuable content and the links they create are nofollow.

Sincerely, Thomas

WP engine is a wonderful host I use them as well.

A content delivery network will have 0 negative effect because of the way the code has changed on your website.

Simply use a C name. Or don't it really doesn't matter

for instance you could have www.example.com

that in your DNS

create a C name cdn.example.com  to the right allow for username-wpengine.domain.com

then everything looks like CDN.example.com

I believe WP engine will change that for you even however you guys are worried about things that do not matter

a content delivery network will make your website much faster and regardless of if you think the code is ugly or not

it does not make a difference nothing negative will happen only good things happen when you use a CDN I strongly suggest you use them on pretty much anything and do not worry about the coding.

I have a lot of sites with content delivery networks and every one of them ranked better after using CDN than before.

Sincerely,

Thomas

Hi Phil & Jason,

I thought this may be of some use as well. It is pretty basic but gives some very good reasons for a modern updated website.

http://www.zemanta.com/blog/you-might-need-a-new-website-design/

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/leave-a-website/

I hope this it is of help,

Thomas

Hi Wesley & D.,

I really appreciate the what you said & did however I did not administer the experiment or create content.

Thank you for the kind words however I did not do the work for this I only for the used it as a reference to describe the situation.

I am glad it helped,

All the best,

Thomas

affect SERPs the 303 redirect remains fairly unknown because it is rarely used.

I came across a website linking to one of my sites with a 303 but I could not find a definitive answer of whether or not this link passed any PageRank. Information online about this was scarce and the only information I found was from people saying that only 301 redirects pass PageRank.

When I checked the status code for 303 redirect at w3.org it was “See other” . The description reads as follows:

“The new URI is not a substitute reference for the originally requested resource. The 303 response MUST NOT be cached, but the response to the second (redirected) request might be cacheable.”

This sounds very black and white and I my initial guess was that Google does not flow PR for 303 redirects. But I was curious, how was Google treating 303 redirects?

I set up an experiment to check how Google was handling the 303. Results below:

*Note: The translation for this keyword is NSFW

Google will show the search result with the URI that is initially requested. It will then show the Page Title and Meta Description (or other descriptive snippet) for the redirected page but it will show the URI from the redirecting page. It is caching the text from the final page but assigning it to the requested page.

How Google caches 303 redirects

Page A 303 redirects to Page B

Title: Page B

URI: Page A

Meta Description: Page B

Since page B does not rank for this keyword it is confirmed that the 303 redirect does not flow PR.

How did I set this test up?

1. I chose a rare keyword that had very few pages ranking for it.
2. On www.a.com I created two pages containing the keyword with the same exact content (www.a.com/a.htm .com/b.htm)
3. One page (www.a.com/a.htm) was linked to internally multiple times
4. One page  (www.a.com/b.htm) was linked to externally with 303 redirects only from two domains (including www.marketingchip.com)
5. The 303 redirects were created on the external pages (www.marketingchip.com/special-doors.html -> 303 -> www.a.com/b.htm)

After a few days neither www.a.com/a.htm nor www.a.com/b.htm appear in the results. However the number one listing for this keyword was forwww.marketingchip.com/special-doors.html but the meta title and the meta description are taken from www.a.com/b.htm. I acquired the information from this URL and would agree with Wesley definitely 301 redirect the link to not use a 303 and less you are trying to accomplish something similar to what it's shown above or in Wesley's comment. http://www.marketingchip.com/seo-experiments/how-does-a-303-redirect-affect-seo/ Sincerely, Thomas

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