Custom Landing Page URLs

[SIMbiz]

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

[Dr-Pete]

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.

[SIMbiz]

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

[Dr-Pete]

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.

[EvanSteed]

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