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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

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 !

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.

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

Thanks, I really like your answer.

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