How to link back to our main site from landing pages without getting penalized
-
I work for a small family insurance agency in CA and I am trying to learn how to compete in this extremely competitive industry. One of the ideas we had was to purchase all the long-tail keyword urls we could and use them as landing pages to direct traffic back to our primary site. (ex. autoinsurancecity.com).
Our thought was that we could put landing pages on each that looked almost identical to the main page and use the navigation in the landing pages as links to direct traffic to the applicable category pages on the main site. (Ex. autoinsurancecity.com -> mainpage.com/auto-insurance).
My concern is that I want to make sure we don't tick off Google. Implementing this strategy would result in each of the category pages getting lots of links from the landing page navigation very quickly. I don't think the links will be worth much from an SEO perspective, but I don't want them to look like spam either.
Any suggestions on if this sort of tactic would put us at risk of being penalized? If so, does anyone have any suggestions on a better way to implement a strategy like this?
Thank you in advance for the help! I'm totally new to this and any advice goes a long way!
-
Thanks for the advice! We will definitely continue focusing on the long-tail on our site.
We definitely aren't focusing solely on SEO for our business. It's tough, especially since I am teaching myself from scratch, so it is just one of the many ways we are trying to compete. Our hope is that in the long term it can be one of the many ways we drive new business.
Thanks!
-
Agreed with CafePress.
You can still focus on long-tail, but on your own domain. So www.familysite.com/long-tale-insurance-page.html etc
I'd definitely focus on long tail and also local modifiers. Insurance is probably one of the top 5 most competitive (from an SEO perspective) businesses. Would recommend not focusing your entire marketing portfolio on SEO. may be some great social opportunities, especially if you're local/regional.
My 2 cents.
-
That makes perfect sense. I'll have to come up with a different strategy. I'm glad that I asked!
Thank you!
-
Hello Matt,
What you are doing sounds a lot like doorway pages and you will definitely be flagged if not penalized for it. Aside from the fact that it's frowned upon by search engines, it is also bad for user experience as well.
For example, if I am on shopping.com and start clicking around their navigation bar, I would expect to be situated in the same domain. However, if I found myself suddenly on amazon.com, that would be a cause for concern and frustration.
You can try to game the search engines by creating identical pages but it's most likely they will see through this via your source code, c-block ip, linking profile, etc. as these patterns become apparently pretty quickly.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to get back links with higher rank ?
Hi All , These days I am finding new ways of creating back links. Could any one tell me how to get backlinks with higher DA ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mozentution2 -
Sitewide links and owned site
Hi everyone, I need the community opinion on something. I am webmarketer and SEO for a pure player who runs a couple of e-commerce sites. On one side we have bigsite.com. It makes all our revenue. I have been in charge for years. Results are good. We have smallsite.com. It is starting. But small revenues for the moment. We have a new SEO working on this. My question is : We always had a banner on bigsite.com's homepage, sending valuable traffic to smallsite.com.T he new SEO, has footer sitewide links from smallsite.com to bigsite.com homepage. Considering both sites share same ssl, server and company name, I am quite sure this is out of google's guide lines and would hurt bigsite.com. Do you agree that this is wrong from the new SEO, and that it could hurt my work and the search results for bigsite.com and smallsite.com, as well as team work ? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kepass0 -
E-commerce System without error page
I´d love to know your thoughts about this particular issue: Vtex is top3 e-commerce system in brazil. ( issue is huge) the system do not use 4XX responde codes If there is a error page, they just redirect it to a search page with 200 code. in Google index we can find a lot of "empty" pages ( indexed error pagess) We can´t use noindex for them Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoMartin1
http://www.taniabulhoes.com.br/this-is-a-test
OR
http://www.taniabulhoes.com.br/thisisatest Any suggestions?0 -
Would be the network site map page considered link spam
In the course of the last 18 months my sites have lost from 50 to 70 percent of traffic. Never have used any tricks, just simple white-hat SEO. Anyway, I am now trying to fix things that hadn't been a problem before all those Google updates, but apparently now are. Would appreciate any help.. I used to have a network site map page on everyone of my sites (about 30 sites). It basically would be a page called 'our network' and it'll show a list of links to all of my other sites. These pages were indexed, had decent PR and didn't seem to cause any problem. Here's an example of one of them:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
http://www.psoriasisguide.ca/psoriasis_scg.html In the light of Panda and Penguin and all these 'bad links' I decided to get rid of most of them. My traffic didn't recover at all, it actually went further down. Not sure if there is any connection to what I'd done. So, the question is: In your opinion/experience, do you think such network sitemap pages could be causing penalties for link spam?0 -
Should I 'nofollow' links between my own sites?
We have five sites which are largely unrelated but for cross-promotional purpose our company wishes to cross link between all our sites, possibly in the footer. I have warned about potential consequences of cross-linking in this way and certainly don't want our sites to be viewed as some sort of 'link ring' if they all link to one another. Just wondering if linking between sites you own really is that much of an issue and whether we should 'nofollow' the links in order to prevent being slapped with any sort of penalty for cross-linking.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simon_realbuzz0 -
Landing Page - Home Page redesign SEO factor question - Serious concern.
Hi Folks, I'm considering making a big change to our website and really need some expert advise. Will we lose ranking if we do what I propose? Our site www.meninkilts.com, needs to split users/clients by "Commercial" and "Residential" so we can message/market completely differently to each client. We are considering doing this structure: Landing Page | | Commercial Homepage Residential Homepage Right now we rank well, for our keywords like "Window Cleaning cityname" but are worried that adding a landing page, and splitting our site to two homepages will effect seo (ie: a landing page would only have two buttons: one for commercial and one for residential). What would be the best way to handle this. Looking forward to your insights! Cheers Brent
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MenInKilts0 -
Should I link my similar sites together?
Hi I currently have two sites within exactly the same market. I've just purchased a third website from someone. Should I link these sites together? (i.e. in the page header should I cross link them or point two of them to the third?) If I do this will it harm them if they are on the same C-Class IP blocks? Is using private domains and different hosting companies considered dodgey in any way? Basically I'm a big wimp and don't want to do anything potentially that might potentially hurt my rankings;)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blendfish0