Creating a Landing Page with a Separate Domain to Control Bounce Rate

[jhacker]

I work with a unique situation where we have a site that gets tons of free traffic from internal free resources. We do make revenue from this traffic, but due to its nature, it has a high bounce rate. Data shows that once someone from this source does click a second page, they are engaged, so they either bounce or click multiple pages.

After testing various landing pages, I've determined that the best solution would be to create a landing page on a separate domain and hide it from the search engines (to prevent duplicate content and the appearance of link farming). The theory is that once they click through to the site, they will bounce at a lower rate and improve the stats of the website. The landing page would essentially filter out this bad traffic.

My question is, how sound is this theory?  Will this cause any issues with Google or any other search engines?

[DirkC]

I fully agree with Egol - the moment you start "manipulating" traffic just to please Google, you're taking the wrong direction. I can maybe work for a few months, even years, but in the end it's always a bad strategy.

The only valid strategy is trying to figure out how to please your visitors, and traffic & Google will follow. It's not always easy to cope with the pressure for to change things, because your competitors are doing it that way, or because you have certain targets, but you'll win in the long run.

[TommyTan]

HI Jennifer,

I don't see bounce rate as a bad metric in this case.  As long as you're generating revenue and getting quality visitors after clicking through, i think that is fine.  I wouldn't waste time and money creating a new landing page and risk running into any issues on Google's side or diluting the traffic and possibly backlinks.

Maybe you can try getting more quality backlinks so that the traffic you get from those sites will click through and thus lower bounce rate.  Furthermore, instead of wasting time on creating a new landing page, you can work on optimizing the current landing page so that those who usually bounce will click through.

Hope this helps.

Thank you!

[EGOL]

How sound is this theory?

I'll just say what I do and why, because I don't know how google handles this.

I have lots of pages on most of my sites that are "reference materials" that a visitor might look at, get the needed info, and leave in a short time.  I would not put these pages into another domain or hide them in any way.  I believe that google knows "the nature of this traffic".

What I believe is important is to do all that you can to entice the visitor to view another page.  Do this by creating closely related content and offering that to the visitor in very attractive links that every visitor to that page will see.   I frequently use nice size image links similar to what is used by the Taboola, Outbrain and other content marketing platforms.  This works well on content pages.

On retail pages, I do not fear offering links to content that tells the visitor "how to use" the product, "how to select", "ideas to have fun with" etc.  All of these are good for the visitor and if they see that you have lots of good content they will buy from you.

Getting back to "the nature of the traffic".   All you need to do to outrank your competitor in my opinion is to provide better engagement for the visitor because every website that receives this "nature of traffic" has the same problem.  Just do better that the competitors and you will win.