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
-
Duplicate page content
Hi Crawl errors is showing 2 pages of duplicate content for my clients WordPress site: /news/ & /category/featured/ Yoast is installed so how best to resolve this ? i see that both pages are canonicalised to themselves so presume just need to change the canonical tag on /category/featured/ to reference /news/ ?(since news is the page with higher authority and the main page for showing this info) or is there other way in Yoast or WP to deal with this & prevent from happening again ? Cheers Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Wrong Page is Ranking
My client is an Ecommerce reseller of a few major scooter brands. We currently rank fifth for a particular brand name but our main brand page isn't the one that ranks. Instead, it's a product page. The main brand page has an A rating from Moz for the desired keyword phrases. Neither page has any backlinks. Any ideas on why our main brand page would be outranked by a product page? What could we do to change this?
On-Page Optimization | | TrinShin0 -
How can i change my landing page title in search engines?
Hi SEO folks, Please help! I've changed my home page title 30 days ago, but my Google search results is still showing the old one! Why is that happening? can I've a brief explanation please so i can learn. thanks a million cRnPa6d
On-Page Optimization | | aptustelecom0 -
Why isn't our site being shown on the first page of Google for a query using the exact domain, when its pages are indeed indexed by Google
When I type our domain.com as a query into Google, I only see one of our pages on the homepage, and it's in 4th position. It seems though, that all pages of the site are indexed by google when I type in the query "site:domain.com". There was an issue at the site launch, where the robots.txt file was left active for around two weeks. Would this have been responsible for the fact that another domain ranks #1 when we type in our own domain? It has been around a couple of months now since the site was launched. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | featherseo0 -
Google indexing page differently
Does google index an interal page differently depending on whether you are using a FULL url (including domain) or just a relative link? Also, is it possible that using a full URL (http://mysite.com/page.html) causes the browser to "ping" the server differently than just having the href linked to using relative links (/page.html) Could this cause server or firewall perfomance issues?
On-Page Optimization | | WebRiverGroup0 -
On Page SEO Tool
Hello - I'm looking for one tool that does the following and was wondering if anyone knew of such a tool? In a perfect world I would like to enter in one domain name and have a report generated that shows All Internal links, link titles, and anchor text All internal broken links / redirects All images, image size and image alt, if the image alt is missing. I'd love to be about to export these reports to excel and quickly run my on page optimization. The goal is to produce a checklist for a developer to execute quickly. Thanks for your help Gabe
On-Page Optimization | | Gabe0 -
Source page leading to a 404 pages in reports
Hi everybody, I wonder how to find and quickly correct 404 errors in my crawl reports : SeoMoz says me "http://domain.com/this-page-is-dead" is 404, but I can't figure out a source page where a link to that url appears. I tried a google link:http://domain.com/this-page-is-dead request, with no more luck. I imagine the trick is trivial, but I need it 🙂 Moreover, why do not show a list of pages referring to this 404 page on reports ? Thanks, Loïc
On-Page Optimization | | mandinga0 -
Page Rank Drop
Just trying to get more feedback - so we recently edited title and meta descriptions for existing website SEO and we've noticed in the past several weeks, our client's website has dropped out of the top 50 in a variety of terms we were targeting that they used to show up for (note: when updating SEO, we DID NOT remove any relevant terms we were targeting). When the website does come up in searches, it is the old meta description and title. So far, the feedback we've gotten is that first, it takes Google a few weeks to recrawl and index - however, we are now on week 3 after the changes and still no rebound in rankings. We were also told to check with the SEO Moz page grader to be sure the keywords were being optimized correctly - got As and Bs for the test terms I tried. We also submitted an XML site map to speed up the crawl process as another user suggested. We've tested the site with various tools to make sure there are redirect errors, etc. and everything looks fine. Again, it's now been 3+ weeks and no ranking rebound. Any other suggestions on what could be happening?
On-Page Optimization | | laidlawseo0