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
-
Top hierarchy pages vs footer links vs header links
Hi All, We want to change some of the linking structure on our website. I think we are repeating some non-important pages at footer menu. So I want to move them as second hierarchy level pages and bring some important pages at footer menu. But I have confusion which pages will get more influence: Top menu or bottom menu or normal pages? What is the best place to link non-important pages; so the link juice will not get diluted by passing through these. And what is the right place for "keyword-pages" which must influence our rankings for such keywords? Again one thing to notice here is we cannot highlight pages which are created in keyword perspective in top menu. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Does subdomain hurt SEO on main site
This client sells event management software and puts all their clients on different subdomains of their main domain. Looking in SEO tools like OSE, when I run a backlink analysis, it pulls up all the backlinks to the subdomains as well as those for the main domain. In webmaster tools when I look at queries, impressions and clicks, they get at least 30 times more traffic and impressions on keywords found in their subdomains and very few on their own. In other words, all these tools are providing a collective analysis of main domain and all subdomains. All the backlinks and keywords recorded for those subdomains are not at all relevent to the keywords they want to rank for. For example, their software supports Boy Scouts, so keywords they rank for according to WT include merit badge, scout camp, etc., but of course, that's on the subdomain. As a result, if you were to take a snapshot of their online presence as these tools do, you would think they were a boy scout website and not a software developer if you include the subdomain, along with its PR, backlinks, keywords, etc. So the question I have is, does Google connect all these subdomains with the main domain and then water down the main site with irrelevant keywords, content and backlinks? Or does Google see all those subdomains as completely separate and we don't need to worry or move their clients off their subdomain? I'm worried about Google assigning a "boy scout" relevancy to them. Am I wrong? What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katandmouse0 -
First Link on Page Still Only Link on Page?
Bruce Clay and others did some research and found that the first link on the page is the most important and what is accredited as the link. Any other links on the page mean nothing. Is this still true? And in that case, on an ecommerce site with category links in the top navigation (which is high on the code), is it not useful to link to categories in the content of the page? Because the category is already linked to on that page. Thank you, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
When removing a product page from an ecommerce site?
What is the best practice for removing a product page from an Ecommerce site? If a 301 is not available and the page is already crawled by the search engine A. block it out in the robot.txt B. let it 404
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
Main Keyword penalized. And now?
Hello SEO comunity. In one of the sites that I work, our team won numerous keywords in the first searching results. Unfortunately, on june we lost the most important site keyword. It was a general Word, very disputed, that generated a lot of traffic to us. The problem: it droped from third to fifty position. I’d like your help to identify the possible punishments and than find the solutions. What could happened? Where do we start? Is there any checklist to verify the punishments? What do you suggest to me? PS: We always do a clean job, getting away form the blackhat techniques; We didn’t received any notification from Google; During two year, the keyword was in the first ten positions. Actually, I'm looking for an explanation for what happened to me, to get my top10 again. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webg0 -
End of March we migrated our site over to HubSpot. We went from page 3 on Google to non existent. Still found on page 2 of Yahoo and Bing. Beyond frustrated...HELP PLEASE "www.vortexpartswashers.com"
End of March we migrated our site over to HubSpot. We went from page 3 on Google to non existent. Still found on page 2 of Yahoo and Bing under same keywords " parts washers" Beyond frustrated...HELP PLEASE "www.vortexpartswashers.com"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhart0 -
Main page - catogory and sub-catogories
This is a complex one for me but here goes. my site sales personalized widgets and this is the main keyword. other keyword that convert are gold personalized widgets silver personalized widgets brass personalized widgets and many others. all those keywords are categories including the main keyword. (each category is a page on my site optimized for that category) (If you did not guess already I sale jewelry. I assume that having the keyword included in links pointing to intenal category pages dilute the importance of this keyword on the main page? there are few options I consider. for testing have the gold,silver and others to include canonical to the main page just to test the affect on the main keyword. Not pointing from the main page to those sub-category pages - it feels wrong to me just canonize the main keyword category page to point to the main page Would love o hear what are our thoughts
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ciznerguy0 -
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