Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Robert Without seeing the site, just going by the question, this is honestly not something I'd worry about. "Duplicate content" is really only an issue if you are stealing/scraping content from other people and copying it onto your site in aggregate. Having the same text appear on one page and then another, if it's your own unique text is OK. Of course in context those pages need to be uniquely valuable for users. The homepage needs to fulfill a purpose, and the inner pages need to fulfill different purposes.

We've tried the affiliate route for lead gen on the CPL model and even though the ratio for leads/deal is high , it did turn out to deliver a positive ROI for the client. You can also try contacting agencies that specialize in this kind of lead gen and buy leads on a CPL model from them ( go only for exclusive leads or you'll be fighting 5-6 other competitors for the business)

Hello Robert, So doing the right thing for the client aside (which would be to advise them to nofollow those links for their own long-term benefit), if they are still ranking very well it is doubtful that they have a site-wide "penalty" or "filter" like Penguin, Panda or any others. Most likely if traffic has dropped significantly, but not dramatically, you could be looking at a loss of pagerank (not the green bar PR, but the real stuff) due to Google blocking the flow of PR from those, or other, links. If that is the case then nofollowing them would neither help nor hurt because they aren't being counted anyway, and the site isn't currently being filtered or penalized. However, it could help in the future if you nofollowed them because you never know when "not counting" a link could turn into "penalizing you for it". It could only be an update away...

Here's my take: First, basing user experience on cookies isn't always the best experience. Folks change browsers throughout the day (phone, tablet, laptop, desktop) and they often browse privately and/or clear their cookies. This means LOTS of folks will be landing on the "first-time" page when they are actually returning visitors. But if you can live with this, fine. From an SEO point of view, where are you directing bots like Googlebot that don't accept cookies? Will bots see the "new visitor" page? Do you want bots to see the new visitor page?  (sorry for so many questions, but I don't know your objectives - but these are important questions to think about) Overall, it's typically best to have a consistent experience between bots and visitors. If this means javascript popup for folks without a cookie set, this might be the best option (but still not ideal, because popups can negatively effect visitor usage and satisfaction metrics, like bounce rate) If this is something you have to do, I'd go with the popup, but first I'd try to talk the client out of it

Hi Robert, Thanks for coming here with your good question. There are 2 important issues here. As First points out, sharing an address with other businesses is problematic. If your client's address duplicates that of even one other business, you can expect troubles ahead. Google will likely merge the info of the two businesses, meaning that your client could end up with the other business' phone number, reviews, or analytical data on her listing. So, sharing an address is out, unfortunately.  The only exception to this included in the Google Places Guidelines (http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528) is this: Some businesses may be located within a mall or a container store, which is a store that contains another business. If your business is within a container store or mall, and you'd like to include this information in your listing, specify the container store in parentheses in the business name field. For example, Starbucks (inside Safeway). But, it doesn't sound like your client is within a container store or a mall, so I would not consider this truly applicable to the situation. I cannot recommend using a floor number. Even if the client has a distinct business name and phone number, I feel merging is going to be a likely outcome. Here is an excerpted user comment one a Mike Blumenthal post (http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/19/the-long-and-winding-tale-of-trying-to-fix-a-merged-listing/) regarding a merged business: "We have had this problem for about a year and Google won’t fix it. They say it will be fixed but is not. Me and the other law firm have joined up and are both e mailing Ashley with the same case no. to try and convince Google to use our user data instead of assuming we are the same company. Since the address uses a Floor number (Not a suite number) and a mail room sorts the mail, Google says it is the same business even though the other details like the phone number, are different. We both meet clients and have offices in several locations in the Inland Empire, as we both lease from the same leasing company. That is where the relationship ends. I think the work around maye be to add an identifier after the floor number, such as -A, or -B. So it would appear like #400-A." (emphasis mine) You are always supposed to use the precise street address at which the client receives mail when creating any Google Local property. You are not supposed to add or subtract anything from the mix. So what option does this leave your client with if he/she wants to participate in Local? Getting legitimate suite numbers assigned by the post office to the different businesses on the floor would be the only open road, as far as I can see. You will need to contact the postal service in the client's area, as well as all of the other businesses located on that floor to try to arrange this, if you can. Not a great solution. But as things currently stand, without your client having a distinct address, they are lacking one of the 3 key metrics for local inclusion which are: A unique local area code phone number A unique physical street address In-person transactions with customers. Hope my reply is, at least, helpful, even if it doesn't automatically solve the issue. Sincerely wishing you good luck!

What about posting a short mention and link to your new article on several user forums that are related to your niche? This form of article promotion can be quite productive. It is a form of link building. This method would be most effective if the links are to the article on your site. I would not advise publicizing an article on a 3rd party site for the purpose of building a link to your site, then linking to that article. You can take this approach and it does have benefits, but your efforts and the link juice are diluted.

I realise this response is almost a year old, but I've only just found it. I am about to start using Optimizely, but am concerned about affecting my ranking especially now that we have a new Penguin update due any time now. The nice guy at Optimizely told me today (during the webinar for newbies) that you could use Optimizely to permanently direct different sorts of visitors to different content. For example, he pointed out that people who today run IE 6 are very different from people who run IE 9. And depending on your market it might make sense to give those two groups different messaging.  But Google specifically say don't deliver different content based on user-agent. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/website-testing-google-search.html  And on the last point in that article, how long is too long?