Is a lot of inbound traffic coming from site a problem for SEO?

[sembseo]

We have a site which is going to deliver content to a big news site and in return we will receive a lot of traffic from the news site.

Estimates are that it will be about 50% of our daily traffic.

Before this we have about 2000 daily visits, where 50% is from organic traffic.

How will this affect our rankings?

(It should be pretty obvious to Google that an increase like that in reffered traffic is bought - which I assume will ahve a negative impact on our organic rankings)

What is the best tactic to use - regarding SEO - if (when) we proceed to deliver content/recieve traffic from that news site? (we have a lot of decent rankings on several branch keywords, and we don't want to risk those rankings. On the other hand - if we could improve our rankings from this deal - we would like inputs to that as well?

Best regards,

Chris

[DennisSeymour]

Id make sure your site can load fast, promote engagement with social media, other posts you have or whatever, so you lower your bounce rate and improve your inbound signals. You should be ranking better than ever after that. Just keep them on the site and make good use of your traffic

[sembseo]

And which should I choose on links from the news site - do-follow or no-follow?

Normally I would always choose "do-follow" but in this instance - where I have some fears that Google would see it as bought traffic (which it in some way is) - I am contemplating no-follow...but will it make any difference?

Chris

[sembseo]

Thanks a lot Dennis

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

If you are paying for the site to publish your content or even if it's like a guest blog thing, you should use no-follow for the links.  Google shouldn't care if you get a huge bump in traffic (technically, they say the Google search algorithm doesn't ever look at analytics data.  So, the bump in traffic should be any concern for you, only the new links.  As long as you no-follow the links, you should be fine.  In fact, that's specifically what Google says to do if you are paying for links or guest blogging.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

One other thing...

I'm assuming (hoping) that the content you will be providing the news site will be original and not reprinted on your site.  If you do reprint on your site, you should use a canonical tag to establish the originator of the content, which the news site will probably want to be them.

Also, if you have setup a Google+ authorship account, you can claim authorship of the articles that are being published on the news site as well as content on your own site.  That can help with your search rankings as well.  Right now, Google says authorship doesn't affect rankings (which i think is debatable), but I know for a fact that it does affect personalized results.