Custom Landing Page URLs
-
I will begin creating custom landing pages optimized for long-tail keywords. Placing the keywords in the URL is obviously important -- Question: would it be detrimental to rankings to have extra characters extending past the keyword?
I'm not able to use tracking code, but need to put an identifier in the URL (clp = custom landing page).
For example, is
"www.domain.com/silver-fish.html"
going to perform meaningfully better than
"www.domain.com/silver-fish-clp.html"
for the kw phrase "silver fish"?
There will obviously be a lot of on-page optimization in addition to just structuring the URLs.
Thank you.
SIMbiz
-
It's a complicated issue, but adding 50K variations to 27K product pages can definitely be dangerous, especially post-Panda. At best, you're diluting your index and your ranking ability. At worst, Google could actually start de-indexing or at least devaluing core pages. Personally, I don't think the long-tail gains are worth the risk - these kinds of pages were behind the "May Day" update in 2010, and Panda continued that core philosophy. Google considers it a low-value tactic in 2012 - of that, I have no doubt at all.
Of course, it does depend on how you use them. To have custom landers for PPC and not index them is perfectly fine, for example. If you're tripling your indexed page count with thin content just to target SEO keywords, though, you're taking a very real risk, IMO.
-
Thanks for the great advice. However, now I'm becoming even more concerned about dynamically generated custom landing pages.
We are an ecommerce company selling product, and we have about 27k items and another 5k or so of content pages, not to mention 10k product reviews on the subdomain "reviews.domain.com" which are intended to do double-duty as SEO-targeted custom landing pages.
A third-party site-search provider as an add-on service is creating custom pages based on natural search queries that bring users to our site. For example, if a user searches for the term "big-toed troll t-shirt," a page would be generated on a subdomain that would look like "subdomain.domain.com/big-toed-toll-t-shirt.html." The page would include a list of related items that are derived from a search query and internal linking across the the included items. There are other on-page optimizations based on the KW phrase.
These pages are driving traffic, but I am concerned about cannibalization and other issues. To date, there have been something like 50K of these pages created.
Is this dangerous? I have more than 70 employees to support and I don't want to make a bonehead move that could put their jobs at risk.
Thanks.
SIMBiz
-
First off, a slight word of warning. When you spin out the custom landing pages, make sure they have unique content and don't do it in large numbers. It used to be that these kind of long-tail, keyword-targeted pages could help SEO (or, at worst, not hurt it). Since Panda and Google's attack on thin content over the past couple of years, these pages can actually cause you SEO harm. It depends a lot on the quantity and quality, of course. If you spin out 500 pages on a 50 page site just to target a bunch of keywords, and those pages only differ by a sentence or a few words, you're going to do more harm than good.
I doubt the two URLs you list would be much different. Theoretically, the shorter URL will focus more keyword power on "silver fish", but URL keywords are just one, relatively weak ranking factor, and you're talking about 4 characters.
You could use a hash-tag style URL, like:
www.domain.com/silver-fish.html#clp
I think those characers would be ignored by Google. Unfortunately, you'd have to modify your analytics to read them (as they'll be ignored by most analytics packages, too). Here's an article on how to do it in GA:
http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/how-to-track-clicks-on-anchors-in-google-analytics.html
That's a pretty technical feat for something that I doubt would have much impact, though.
-
Good Evening SIMbiz! That's a really interesting question. I would imagine the closer the URL to exact keyword match, the better. However a couple extra characters should not be too detrimental, especially if those extra characters are a nonsensical string of letters or a short string of numbers. One issue I've run into in the past, which you're probably way smarter and would never do something like this, is the creation of very similar (aka duplicate) content pages as a means to have a static page for each unique referrer site. Later to learn how to clean up the link juice cannibalization with canonicalization. For which I found this page very handy: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization -- Hope it helps. Best, Evan
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
-
SEO for a Italian customer
Ciao tutti, Should I include 300 characters for all my customers' page meta descriptions? Some colleagues told me about this but I'm not really sure. Thanks in avance Marco
On-Page Optimization | | BestSEOItaly3 -
Is it better to create more pages of content or expand on current pages of content?
I am assuming that one way of improving the rankings of current pages will be to create more content on the keywords used... should this be an expansion of the content on current pages I am optimising for a keyword or is it better to keep creating new pages and if we are creating new pages is it best to use an extension of the keyword on the new page – for example if we are optimising one page for ‘does voltage optimisation work’ would it then be worth creating a page optimised for ‘does voltage optimisation work in hotels’ for example and so on? I am guessing maybe both might help, this is just a question I have had from one of my clients.
On-Page Optimization | | TWSI1 -
Page authority still on 1 after url change and 301 redirect
Hi Moz analytics suggestion to help ranking is to have a keyword or phrase in the url so I advised a client to do this they changed one of their pages urls, this page previously had a page authority of 26 since the change its gone down to 1.
On-Page Optimization | | genkee
I advised them that they must do a 301 from the old page but they took a few weeks to do this, would this of affected it why is it not showing up yet its been 3 weeks now, since the 301 and 5 weeks since the url change.0 -
Form Only Pages Considered No Content/Duplicate Pages
We have a lot of WordPress sites with pages that contain only a form. The header, sidebar and footer content is the same as what's one other pages throughout the site. Each form page has a unique page title, meta description, form title and questions but the form title, description and questions add up to probably less than 100 words. Are these form pages negatively affecting the rankings of our landing pages or being viewed as duplicate or no content pages?
On-Page Optimization | | projectassistant0 -
Category listing page coming above product pages
A new SEO client we have taken on seem to be hitting most of the points right on with their site and SEO. However one thing that is bugging me is that their category pages i.e. "Footwear" which title tag includes the brands they stock. Is almost always coming up above (if they are ever even found) the product individual pages. Anyone seen this sort of things happening? Very frustrating.
On-Page Optimization | | iboxsecurityltd0 -
URL Length
I know a URL should "technically" shorter than 75 characters. Does that include the http://www.domainname.com ? Thank you 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | Libra0130 -
Page Indexing
Hello All Nice easy question! I've made some on page changes to page titles, content, H1s etc but wanted to know if there was a way to check if Google has reindexed the page since the changes were made? I appreciate the different factors that will help improve your crawl rate like new content, external links, domain authority etc. I made these changes around 2 weeks ago. Google has cached the pages since I made the changes but not picked up on the new page titles in the search results. Cheers Todd
On-Page Optimization | | todd75850 -
Results in the On-Page
I put one site (www.fmredesdeprotecao.com.br) and register some keywords, but the keywords don't appear in the results On-Page like the other campaigns. How can I solve that?
On-Page Optimization | | Ex20