Hey Richard, for us it all depends on the kind of work. For audits we generally charge up front for smaller jobs and 50% up front and 50% on delivery for medium to large jobs.

If it is a monthly arrangement, then that is generally a monthly billing cycle but I would always make sure the client is serious about the project and has enough going on to ensure they can pay and if payment stops, so does the work.

For content creation we will often do a 50% up front and 50% on delivery as well.

No hard and fast rules really - you just have to figure out what is fair and what works for you and your clients.

Hope that helps

Marcus

Hey Bob

I think you should forget about any kind of perceived conventions and have whatever you think works best for your users and goals.

Again, look at unbounce, that is a custom landing page with a homepage link (to share the love) but not the general site navigation.

They also have a footer to do a bit more link love but really, do what works for you.

Forget conventions - do what works!

Hope that helps
Marcus

Yep, check the HTTP headers with webbug or there are a bunch of browser plugins that will let you see the headers for the document.

That said, I would push to drive the links to the page though rather than the document itself and just create a nice page that houses the document and make that the link target.

You could even make the PDF link only available by email once they have singed up or some such as canonical is only a directive and you would still be better getting those links flooding into a real page on the site.

You could even offer up some HTML to make this easier for folks to link to that linked to your main page. If you take a look at any savvy infographics etc folks will try to draw a link into a page rather than the image itself for the very same reasons.

If you look at something like the Noobs Guide to Online Marketing from Unbounce then you will see something like this as the suggested linking code:

[](<strong>http://unbounce.com/noob-guide-to-online-marketing-infographic/</strong>)

[](<strong>http://unbounce.com/noob-guide-to-online-marketing-infographic/</strong>)

[](<strong>http://unbounce.com/noob-guide-to-online-marketing-infographic/</strong>)

Unbounce – The DIY Landing Page Platform

So, the image is there but the link they are pimping is a standard page:

http://unbounce.com/noob-guide-to-online-marketing-infographic/

They also cheekily add an extra homepage link in as well with some keywords and the brand so if folks don't remove that they still get that benefit.

Ultimately, it means that when links flood into the site they benefit the whole site rather than just promote one PDF.

Just my tuppence! 
Marcus

Hey Bob

There is a much easier way to do this and simply have your PDFs that you don't want indexed in a folder that you block access to in robots.txt. This way you can just drop PDFs into articles and link to them knowing full well these pages will not be indexed.

Assuming you had a PDF called article.pdf in a folder called pdfs/ then the following would prevent indexation.

User-agent: * Disallow: /pdfs/

Or to just block the file itself:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /pdfs/yourfile.pdf Additionally, There is no reason not to add the canonical link as well and if you find people are linking directly to the PDF then having this would ensure that the equity associated with those links was correctly attributed to the parent page (always a good thing).

Header add Link '<http: www.url.co.uk="" pdfs="" article.html="">; </http:> rel="canonical"'

Generally, there are better ways to block indexation than with robots.txt but in the case of PDFs, we really don't want these files indexed as they make for such poor landing pages (no navigation) and we certainly want to remove any competition or duplication between the page and the PDF so in this case, it makes for a quick, painless and suitable solution.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Great, comprehensive answer from Ryan as ever.

Nothing more to see here folks.

Move along now.

Move along.