Landing Pages

[ScottBaxterWW]

Howdy Guys,

We currently have around 19 landing pages that are near enough identical for each make of car.

The content on each page isn't identical but you can tell its a template.

Do you think we should change this and just target models instead of makes.

Thanks,

Scott

[Dr-Pete]

I think this is borderline and the kind of thing Panda hit in some cases. While the pages aren't true duplicates, they do appear a bit thin - they're basically the same content with a few brand-related keywords swapped out. It really comes down to scope, though - if you spun out 100s or 1000s of these, you could really dilute your index and even creep into potential Panda penalty territory.

With about 600 pages in the index, though, and these accounting for only 19 of them, it seems like your risk is pretty low. It would be great to build out the content and make it more unique, but I don't think you're in any immediate danger. You don't want to NOINDEX or block these pages somehow, because I assume you're trying to get some mileage out of the long-tail keywords. My best advice is to try to beef them up and don't spin out too many variants (100+ of these pages with a 600 page site would be dangerous).

[donford]

Hi Scott,

I'm not an expert on Panda but from what I personally have gathered is most of the sites hit were ones involved in some form or another with link exchanges, or "bad" paid seo services. The paid services usually used some severally black hat tricks to get immediate results, get their money and run. Duplicate content is something to worry about but using a template is not going to cause any problem unless you are dynamically creating content based on every possible keyword, resulting in millions of pages with very little differences.

As far gathering the long tail keywords.. I have used Google Ad Words, keyword suggestion tool. Type in some broad keywords, and let them suggest some keywords play with the filtering settings and see what keywords are the most appropriate for your market that also have the best traffic, then optimize for those.

The keyword suggestion tool is located in Google Ad Words > Tools & Analysis > Keyword Tool

Hope this helps

Don

[ScottBaxterWW]

Great reply Don!

The main reason to ask the question really is for general knowledge.

Our main site was hit pretty hard in the penguin update back in April and we have been removing links and completing overhauling our website to try and get out of the penalty.

We / I was just checking this couldn't be effecting the panda update neither.

We are thinking of targeting the models slightly more though like "bwm 3 series warranty"

How do you fully test long tail keywords...

[donford]

Hi Scott,

I will comment on the template part first. There is no problem with using a template, most websites do. I looked at your site, the content on each page is different enough not to warrant any concern.

I do wonder why you asked the question other then that, are your worried about Google Ad Ratings, or just keyword optimization or just general seo?

Overall I will just add this, if you're trying to rank in the top SERP's for YMM (Year / Make / Model) you may have trouble because those are hugely contested keywords. And your service really isn't something that "most" people would expect to see when searching for their YMM. However, it is something they may want to see if they search for YMM + warranty or extended warranty. Which is why I would suggest evaluating the long-tail keywords and seeing if I can get those to rank first.

Hope that helps,

Don

[roquelagellera]

Hi again Scott,

I would emphasize more the car´s brand but since there is no need to navigate trough those landings to select your brand, template usage its fine.

Kind regards

[ScottBaxterWW]

When I say they are the same template, here is an example:

http://goo.gl/PzoHO

http://goo.gl/6z5hJ

Let me know what you think of the above.

[roquelagellera]

Hi Scott:

Does those landing pages have correlations with ecach other? Users should navigate trough one or more of those landing pages to buy the product? If so, i would highly recommend to customize every template to the product in question. If not, there is no problem for using the same template IMO.

Kind regards