To increase on page potency try minimizing links leaving the page (as all links show as text as you mentioned) or adding more content per page to distinguish each page more (for a higher relevance score) for the pages main keyword.

Other wise, use a common image or images in the template for all of your download pages that consolidate ranking factor to your main cyclical pages or main category page.

If you are going to have thousands of pages, you may as well use them to consolidate a few major champion pages (which you can do with all in title or all in anchor relevance) from changing titles or links…

The reason I asked that ? was, I’m looking at the Google Cache (text-only version) for a few of my webpages.

I noticed how the Alt-Text (keywords) show as text/content, so I was thinking regardless of the no-follow in the .zip url, the Image Alt text should still show in the Google Cache (text-only version) which is what the Google spider is really crawling, so at the very least it could give my page more text content. Do I have this correct or am I way off base.

I still might try a couple of pages, see how it looks in the Google Cache, then make the call.

My real problem is I need more text content/keywords per download page without looking like spam, pretty urls will only get me so far.

Glad you noticed that little tactic I use for revitalizing tiered content deep in the blog. Deep linking from new posts always brings a barrage of new rankings as a result of infusing fresh link flow to old posts (via the RSS feed) and those who link back via trackbacks.

Depending on the popularity of the post, it generates its own backlinks (I have seen up to 1K for a page from this method alone).

Sort of makes you think about building or acquiring natural links vs. the brute force method. It is really a matter of the size of your RSS footprint.

Love the question about the new download / considerations. It almost seems like a moot point about the anchor text on the download buttons (unless you want the zip files to rank).

Similarly, if you are linking to PDF files, make sure to nofollow or link back from the PDF to get the link equity back (in you pass it via do-follow).

If you are bolstering on page content, where you wanted to get a little more punch for your on page, you could consider making an in page #anchor with keyword rich text (much like #top) was used back in the day.

That way, the page for each download has an internal link (linking to itself with a preferred anchor) and then omit using alt on the download button itself.

All the best…

I noticed how you passed that link juice to/from your older blog post (very last link in your blog post – On Page SEO).

I have a ? for you. I’m in the startup stage of a new blog, the blog is a simple CMS site for downloading files (all legit), I have the same download text that leads to a single .zip file download per each page.

I plan on adding a new image to replace the download text, & a no-follow to the .zip file URL, also add some keyword to the Image-ALT. If I add the no-follow will the keywords have any weight, or would the whole Image-ALT be pointless because of the no-follow?

I should be around 8-9k webpages when finished.

Thanks,