Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

Thank you for your answer and suggestions. Google indexed the one without the context, but I think the one with context should be better.

301 redirect is not possible since we want the article to show up in other categories and keep the visitors in the section he was before the click.

I am wondering how you would choose which page to use as a canonical ?

All our articles sit in an article section and they are called in the url when linked from a particular category. Since some articles are in many categories, we may have several links for the same page.

My first idea was to put the one in the article category as the canonical, but I wonder if Google will lose the context of the page for it's ranking because it will not be in the proper category.

For exemple, this page in the article section : http://www.bdc.ca/en/advice_centre/articles/Pages/exporting_entering.aspx

Same page in the Expand Your Sales > Going Global section :

http://www.bdc.ca/EN/advice_centre/expand_your_sales/going_global_or_international_markets/Pages/RelatedArticles.aspx?PATH=/EN/advice_centre/articles/Pages/exporting_entering.aspx

The second one has much more context related to it, like the breadcrumb is showing the path and the left menu is open at the right place.

For  this example, I would choose te second one, but some articles may be found in 2 or 3 categories.

If you could share your lights on this it would be very appreciated !

Thanks

Hi,

Our site has a page for new visitors to select their language to view our website So if you type our brand adress (http://www.bdc.ca) you should be redirected to this "splash" page (http://www.bdc.ca/pages/splashpage.aspx).

What is the SEO impact of doing this and is there a better way for users to choose their languages, SEO-wise (and UX wise) ?

You'll also see that after the visitor select its language, he's redirected to the actual home page using a two 302 redirects ( one to bdc.ca/en/ and then another one to the actual home page).  I am aware of this and I know this is really bad.

Please share what you think would be the best way to manage this language selection in respect to SEO, but with respect to UX too.

Thanks !

Jean-François Monfette

Thank you for your answer.

I convinced our IT team to put build the title field in our CMS to be able to write our own titles.

I was very skeptical of this client side javascript solution too. Now I can work with confidence.

Thank you for your answer.

PHP is not an option since our website is running on an IIS server. I cannot fetch it as Googlebot yet because the solution is only in our development environment.

Hi, I asked our IT team to be able to write custom page titles in our CMS and they came up with a solution that writes the title dynamically with javascript.

When I look on the page, I see the title in the browser, but when I look in the source code, I see the original page title.

I am thinking that Google won't see the new javascript title, so it will not be indexed and have no impact on SEO.

Am I right ?