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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,

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

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 !

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

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

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

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 ?