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Thank you for you answer and comments. We're a little scare of putting a hurdle in front of the visitors and will monitor the impact closely, but they do get a lot of valuable information. We will still measure and compare the rate of downloads before and after the changes.

Thank you for your answer. We will test the new gated content on a small sample of the visitors first and monitor bounce rate closely.

Thank you for your answer !

I fear that maybe Google's quality rankers team could find the page less valuable now or that the content in the ZIP file contributed to the overall SEO score of the page and that would now be out of range for the crawler.

We will A/B test it for sure and I'll try to share the results, if possible.

Regards,

JF

We have a page that ranks really well and gets a lot of traffic. We're wondering what would be the SEO impact of putting a lead gen form before visitors can download what they want.

Currently, entrepreneurs can download a free business plan template kit. It's a zip file that include 6 files like a blank template, an blank Excel for the financials, examples files and links to related articles.

The page is : http://www.bdc.ca/en/advice_centre/tools/business_plan/Pages/default.aspx

Do you think that adding a form before downloading the zip file would cost us rankings?

Thanks,

Thank you for your answer ! I will share it with our IT team.

Hi guys, I have a similar problem, but on IIS7. Our IT department says our 301 redirections file is at it's max size in the webconfig. They could increase the limit, but says it will impact page load speed negatively. What's the impact on page speed of having 5000 to 10000 urls in the rewrite map ?

Also, they're also looking at a solution to look at the redirections only when the site gives a 404, so it would hit 404, then 301, then 200. I am a little scared of this SEO wize. Would it be a problem?

Thanks !

Yes they are treated as two different pages. To inform the search engines that they are the same page, you need to use the canonical URL tag. Here's Moz.com's info about it : http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

You can also declare it to Google in Webmaster tools: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687?hl=en

Bing also offers this functionnality: http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2012/04/27/better-than-canonical-url-normalization.aspx

I hope this helps !

Thanks Bill for you reply.

We have people actually doing research to make sure we're only presenting pertinent suggestions to entrepreneurs and no malicious sites.

Regards,

Thanks, but what about the other links. Is it good practice to nofollow external links? Does it count as link juice sculpting, which is also frowned upon by Google ?

On our website, we have a section of free to low-cost tools that could help small business increase their productivity without spending big bucks. For example, this is the page for online collaboration tools: http://www.bdc.ca/EN/solutions/smart_tech/tech_advice/free_low_cost_applications/Pages/online_collaboration_tools.aspx

None of the company pay anything to be on these list. We actually do quite a lot of research to chose which should be listed there and which should not.

Recently, one of the company in our lists asked us to add rel=nofollow to the link to their website because they add been targeted by a manual action on Google and want their link profile to be as clean as possible (probably too clean).

My question is : Should we add rel=nofollow to all these links ?

Thanks,

Jean-François Monfette

Our IT department is on a big project and we won't have any support for almost a year, that's why I was looking at other solutions.

We currently add about 10 to 20 pages a month, so I probably could redo the sitemap once a month, right after the new content is published.

Thanks, I really like your answer.

I should have thought about cleaning it in Excel. I will get right on it !

We currently don't have an XML sitemap for our site. I generated one using Screaming Frog and it looks ok, but it also contains my tracking url parameters (ref=), which I don't want Google to use, as specified in GWT. Cleaning it will require time and effort which I currently don't have. I also think that having one could help us on Bing.

So my question is: Is it better to submit a "so-so" sitemap than having none at all, or the risks are just too high? Could you explain what could go wrong?

Thanks !

Thank you Dave for taking the time to answer. Have a good weekend !

It grew steadily over time, but it started being really good in September 2012.

Hi everyone,

We had pretty good organic traffic growth for the past 3 years. Some people in our organization think that we were probably affected positively by the algorithm changes (Panda, Penguin,...).

When I plot the dates on a chart I think Panda had no effect, but we had big gains starting five months after Penguin 1.

Do you think the effect could have come that much later ?

Thanks

Thanks a lot for this reply,  I really appreciate it !

I will share this information right now with our development team. This will help a lot. Also, we are moving to Sharepoint 2013 in the summer. I hope they have improved their blogging features.

Thank you both for your comments. I marked it as answered since you seem to agree on the point and clarified my thinking that we would not receive the sought after SEO value of blogging by using iframes.

I will share your answers with our team and try to look for a proper way of doing it.

Our site use Microsoft Sharepoint as a CMS and the blogging features are not  good, as I have heard.

We probably could do bdc.ca/blog, but we would probably have infrastructure issue to mix php pages and apsx pages.

We're thinking about adding a blog to our site, but our CMS blogging features are not good.

Someone suggested using a wordpress blog and putting it in an iframe on our site.

I replied that all the SEO impact of our blogging efforts will be lost because of the iframe. I am right or wrong ?

If I am right, could you suggest better alternatives ?

Thanks in advance !

Jean-François Monfette