Are Landing Pages Not Connected to our Nav Bars considered Black Hat?
-
Hello All,
I have narrowed down our keywords and want to start building out landing pages around them. However, until we get a resource center up, they will not be associated with our nav bars. If I build out landing pages so that I can connect them to our AdWords and other digital advertising initiatives, will we be penalized if they are sort of just out there on our domain?
Thanks!
-
Hi LuaMarketing! Great question and we get asked this a lot from clients/potential clients who have multi-locations. We are actually in the process of rolling out pages to target surrounding cities within a 15 min drive to try to rank for their less competitive markets.
To break apart my response, let's approach this from PPC and SEO.
For PPC efforts, creating landing pages is super effective for your user to get the info specifically what they were searching for, immediately (this stands true for SEO, but I'll get to that). PPC landing pages are generally less text heavy and more focused on CTA's, forms, phone numbers and the like, so having them not indexed in your meta data is helpful and recommended. As noted above, tons of companies large and small do this.
For SEO efforts, always keep in mind not to over-optimize the page as well as making sure it is a part of some internal link so the spiders can find it, crawl it, index it for the SE to rank it. Your content needs to be 100% original, readable to the visitor (Google is basically becoming more and more like a human reader) and relevant to what the searcher entered to make that page display as a result. The other critical component will be to build links to those pages through ethical, non-spammy link building tactics. There are plenty of websites which do not have all of their inner pages listed in the main navigation, nav bar drop downs, footer section... rather, they are embedded appropriately within the inner pages body content or within blog article content. It is certainly doable, however, if you think what you are implementing may be spammy, you just may be right. Follow the best SEO guidelines and practices and keep asking great questions like this and you will get the community behind you to help you grow your sites.
Hope this was helpful! Cheers - Patrick
-
Thank you Federico!
-
Thank you so much Davinia! Very helpful!
-
Thanks, Chris! Extremely helpful.
-
There is zero chance of penalty of doing this. It is just not a good way to optimize the page if you wanted them to be ranked since it will be difficult for Google's spiders to crawl to the page if there are no internal links pointing to it. But since you are planning to send traffic to the landing pages from paid sources, it is a perfectly legitimate way to go. Tons of websites follow the same approach including many large brands. If you ever click on an Adwords ad and go to the landing page, chances are good that the page does not have internal links pointing to it.
-
Hi,
What you are referring to is orphaned pages. These types of pages offer no SEO value as search engines can't find them. So my advice to you would be, if you want these pages to rank and can't add the link to the main navigation then add the link to the html and xml sitemap and if possible within body copy of your website (search engines should still find your pages). If you are building these pages just for Adwords and other advertising and you don't want search engines to find them then use noindex meta tags on each of the pages - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en
Good luck,
Davinia -
If you are "over-optimizing" the page just to "get the lead" then I'd suggest using a noindex tag to avoid that page from being indexed, as most likely, if those are landing pages specifically designed for users coming form online advertising, they don't offer any added value to your main site.
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
-
Are Hotel Vanity Websites considered a Doorway Page to brand.com?
I work for a large 3rd party management company and we use vanity websites to help us market our hotels. They provide us the ability to better manage our content as well as provide value to our customers versus the brand site. An example would be Vanity: http://www.hiltonmonterey.com/Brand.com: http://hiltongardeninn3.hilton.com/en/hotels/california/hilton-garden-inn-monterey-MRYMHGI/index.htmlBased on my reading of Google's guidelines I am concerned that our vanity site may be interpreted as such. Please advise if this is the case.
On-Page Optimization | | JohnJimenez0 -
Should I remove 'local' landing pages? Could these be the cause of traffic drop (duplicate content)?
I have a site that has most of it's traffic from reasonably competitive keywords each with their own landing page. In order to gain more traffic I also created landing pages for counties in the UK and then towns within each county. Each county has around 12 towns landing pages within the county. This has meant I've added around 200 extra pages to my site in order to try and generate more traffic from long tail keywords. I think this may have caused an issue in that it's impossible for me to create unique content for each town/country and therefore I took a 'shortcut' buy creating unique content for each county and used the same content for the towns within it meaning I have lots of pages with the same content just slightly different page titles with a variation on town name. I've duplicated this over about 15 counties meaning I have around 200 pages with only about 15 actual unique pages within them. I think this may actually be harming my site. These pages have been indexed for about a year an I noticed about 6 months ago a drop in traffic by about 50%. Having looked at my analytics this town and county pages actually only account for about 10% of traffic. My question is should I remove these pages and by doing so should I expect an increase in traffic again?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
How to Optimize Multiple Listing Pages
Hello Webmasters, How can I optimize a site having a listings which creates various multiple pages? e.g: Pages like below: http://moz.com/blog?page=2 http://moz.com/blog?page=3 etc I want to optimize meta tags of these pages. If i put common title and description. My moz analysis showing duplicate meta tags and duplicate description issues. Please guide me to optimize these type of pages.
On-Page Optimization | | wmsindia0 -
Why don't all my pages have On Page Optimization Reports
Apologies if this question has been asked a million times, but I can't find it. I have 35 pages, yet only 5 of them have generated On Page Optimization Reports. I know I can create them manually, but wondered if I've done something incorrectly? Iain.
On-Page Optimization | | iainmoran0 -
Why does my on-page report card say my page title is 403 forbidden when its not?
I'm trying to get on top of my on page stuff and I'm going through the SEO Moz on-page report cards and it says I'm scoring a fail on certain elements within the 'critical' and 'high importance' factors as my page title is '403 forbidden' but when I go on to my site, my sites CMS it's not '403 forbidden' it's the text I entered?
On-Page Optimization | | jamesj35mm0 -
On-page: Over optimized images?
Hello guys. I have a small question about an on-page optimization for images. What I have: good title tag / good url structure good content (NOT keyword shuffled, its real content, for real people) images / gallery uploaded to folder named same as article name. For example: Great tips for bloggers [article name], great-tips-for-bloggers [folder name]. So my question is: Will Google harm me for this "too good" paths to images, article related image filenames, with mask like [gtips-img01], and if all images have titles / alt tags? Thank you guys.
On-Page Optimization | | infoo130 -
I am optimizing my webpages according to suggestions from the On Page Report Card. Should I have more than one keyword for a page?
I am optimizing my webpages according to suggestions from the On Page Report Card. Should I have more than one keyword for a page or should I make separate pages for each keyword even when they are similar? Will Google penalize me for making similar pages? Imagine selling, bargain milk chocolate peanut clusters. Keywords examples could be: Bargain chocolate Bargain milk chocolate Bargain milk chocolate peanut clusters Bargain chocolate peanut clusters Chocolate peanut cluster bargains Milk chocolate peanut cluster bargains Etc. Will one page called http://mycompany/bargainmilkchocolatepeanutclusters.com be OK or should I have one called http://mycompany/bargainmilkchocolate.com and one called http://mycompany/bargainmilkchocolatepeanutclusters.com and one called http://mycompany/chocolatepeanutclusterbargains.com , etc.? Thanks for your advice.
On-Page Optimization | | KSHAYY0 -
Canonical tag for home page
This question was asked before but I didn't see a clear answer to it. If I've got a site that has as it's home page: http://www.mysite.com/, and there are many references within the site back to the home page that point to /index.php, should I include a canonical tag in the index.php page like this: to avoid a duplicate content issue, and to have all juice from both links combined into one?
On-Page Optimization | | wcksmith0