Are Landing Pages Not Connected to our Nav Bars considered Black Hat?

[LuaMarketing]

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!

[WhiteboardCreations]

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

[LuaMarketing]

Thank you Federico!

[LuaMarketing]

Thank you so much Davinia!  Very helpful!

[LuaMarketing]

Thanks, Chris!  Extremely helpful.

[Charlessipe]

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.

[Davinia22]

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

[FedeEinhorn]

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.