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I would say that this is absolutely not an instance where you would want to use nofollow. There is a huge difference between this and linking to a insurance company's commercial car insurance page with the anchor text "car insurance". It's sad that Google and the SEO community have jointly scared everyone to the extent that we are afraid of linking to information sources about non-commercial terms (e.g. "Brigham Young" linking to a Wiki page about Brigham Young). Nofollow is meant to indicate that you do not wish to vouch for the source of the information or that you have been paid to include the link and thus don't want to indicate that the link is purely editorial. This use is still true, eight years after nofollow's creation and it would be sad if we reached the stage where people are basically hesitant to link without it in almost every circumstance.

Put this in a commercial context and multiply the rate at which the target page or linking website receives / links out with high-value terms, and you have more of a problem. I have had clients ask me about ratios for years - "can we safely build links with 30% commercial anchor text?" - to which we'd have to say that there is no "safe ratio" for any particular keyword, niche or industry.

Google looks at far more than the anchor text when deciding on what is natural and what should be penalised / filtered. A page about a person or a product might use that person's or product's name nearly 100% of the time and be perfectly natural. I have also personally seen pages with 80%+ brand anchor text be penalised (not by Penguin but manually) because the links were clearly part of a sophisticated but fairly uniform paid link scheme, despite using anchor text links "Brand.com" and "visit their website". A high ratio of commercial anchor text is the icing on the cake for some of these penalties but there is no need to nofollow every link or even a selection of links just because it happens to be exact-match in terms of its destination.

Ideally, I'd ask to see examples of the companies' work within these platforms for other clients. I agree with Prestashop that many companies have made many different platforms work for them in a variety of ways. Modern platforms are usually not too bad for SEO no matter what you go with, but all have their particular issues. I would not worry too much about keywords further down the URL structure; there are many more important factors for best SEO practice, and it's possible / likely that this is not an issue at all anymore. Where the ecommerce platform is hosted also should not be an issue.

The quality of site they can produce within these platforms would be my concern, and it's possible that a company with a "less desirable" platform can actually produce something that is of an overall higher quality, including when it comes to SEO. I'd definitely seek as many case studies / examples as possible.

I would say that obsessing over nofollows or no nofollows is over-complicating things much more than simply linking to more information about a subject. The vast majority of content on the internet that links to informational resources, such as the example you've given (even though you own both resources) is not written or linked to with nofollow / SEO in mind. This is what I mean by it being sad if no one can create content and link between properties, whether they belong to one or more parties, without considering Google, SEO and nofollow.

It's shortsighted to claim that links between owned properties should be nofollowed. This is far from a set rule. Google does not consider linking to your own properties to be spam in and of itself. It would consider deliberate link manipulation via link networks to be spam, but is it spam if amazon.com links to amazon.co.uk? If Moz.com links to Opensiteexplorer.org? If Virgin corporation links to its health club chain? Or if I link from my blog to my consulting site? Hell no, it's not. It would be manipulative of me to create 800 websites promoting SEO consulting and link them all to my own website, however, just as it would be spammy for Virgin to write a new blog post every other day on sites they own, linking to their health clubs with the anchor text "gyms in London".

It's very subjective whether nofollow should be used, but I really do not agree that there is a hard-and-fast rule that any link using "optimised" (i.e. descriptive) anchor text should be nofollowed, just as much as I disagree that links to things you own need to be automatically nofollowed. At which point is a link natural if every link on the internet that meets these criteria is "unnatural"?

I agree that if the link does not add value, it should not be there, but in your example, you mention a person and link to more information about that person. Since a quote from that person is the crux of the page's subject, it absolutely adds value to link to more information about that person, no matter how well-known that person might be to the website's audience. I find it hard to argue that the link does not add value.

Hello fellow Kiwi!

Moving the links to the company's social profiles won't make any difference to how well www.mountainjade.co.nz ranks, but it will make them much less visible and probably result in fewer clicks to each one. Do visitors to the website click on these at the moment? I would expect that traffic to drop substantially if the buttons are placed in the footer.

I honestly don't see these as a contributing to clutter or being an issue - they are fairly discrete both in terms of coding and aesthetics at the moment.

Hi Alan,

I replied to you about this on another thread, but I wanted to reiterate:

My SEO firm claims that Google looks at link profile only when there is a Penguin update and that these only occur once or twice a year.

This is not correct. Google only looks at removing or handing out Penguin penalties during a Penguin update (1, 2 or 3 times per year is the norm), but regular sites with regular link development can improve at all times. Link building might take a month or so to really show progress, but Google crawls and updates its indices almost constantly. It's simply not true that you will only see ranking improvements once or twice a year.

Similarly, you can lose rankings if you lose links that were counting, outside of a Penguin update.

Regarding DA and PA - yes, you can rank well with any combination of these. They are not indicators of how well you will rank, but a gauge of what your site's authority is relative to every other site Moz analyses, based upon backlinks. DA and PA are configured in a way that is meant to best represent how Moz believes Google values backlink profiles, but clearly Moz doesn't have access to Google's actual algorithm or measures of which links Google counts / discounts / values / doesn't value.

Also, "can I rank well" depends on what query you want to rank for. You will easily outrank a far higher authority website if your site is much more relevant to the query (although it's annoying to see high authority websites pop into SERPs for queries that they're not particularly relevant for, and it does happen from time to time).

If you have relatively low authority and you're trying to rank against similar websites with DA / PA scores in the 70s or so, your job is likely to be a lot harder. That said, it can still be done with focus on the specific niches you're interested in and work on improving the number and quality of links pointing to the site.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Jane

As Devanur says, this will achieve your goal. It's worth reiterating that there is nothing inherently wrong with /index.php URLs as long as you cannot access the same content without /index.php. For instance, if www.site.com/page1/index.php exists as well as www.site.com/page1/, then this is duplicate content and should be fixed. I imagine this is your current situation because this is most common when /index.php is being added to URLs.

However, if only one version of every page loads and that version has the /index.php extension, this is not automatically bad. It's preferable for the extension not to be there for the sake of URL tidiness and because this does move the content one folder-level away from the root (not a huge issue, but probably best avoided) however.

If you go through 301 redirects to shift the old URLs to the new ones without /index.php, your rankings should not suffer. There might be a little bit of ranking fluctuation as Google indexes the new URLs and acknowledges the redirects, but nothing permanent. It's worth noting that this is not an absolute rule, however, and that there is always a risk of lowered rankings or rankings not returning to what they were before after a 301 redirect though.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

This isn't a problem, and is quite a common way of presenting content on the "same page" as far as the source code goes without having it all appear on page load. Where this would get you into trouble is if you are presenting a lot of content behind different tabs, or if that content was vastly different to the topic of the page that appears on page load.

If you are using CSS to tab between the content, none of it is uncrawlable.

Bizarrely, I just answered quite a similar question to this about five minutes ago...

Have you looked into the rel="alternate" tag option? Sometimes this is also referred to as the "href lang tag". You can place these on both the UK site and the .com, indicating that the UK site is "the same" but is targeted for UK customers only. This is basically canonicalisation with a geo-targeting twist: it negates the issue of duplicate content whilst reinforcing that the .co.uk is for UK audiences.

More information on the tag is here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

The .co.uk replacing the .com in UK SERPs won't be immediate, but this is a fairly safe option for rankings. Can you also use a javascript lightbox when a UK IP is detected on the .com site, explaining that UK customers have to purchase on the .co.uk and providing a link? It isn't good to automatically redirect based on IP, but a JS pop-up / lightbox will be ignored by search engines and will allow any remaining UK traffic to the .com to make its way to the appropriate website.

Does this help?

Cheers,

Jane