Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is their value in linking to PPC landing pages and using rel="canonical"
-
I have ppc landing pages that are similar to my seo page. The pages are shorter with less text with a focus on converting visitors further along in the purchase cycle.
My questions are:
1. Is there a benefit for having the orphan ppc pages indexed or should I no index them?
2. If indexing does provide benefits, should I create links from my site to the ppc pages or should I just submit them in a sitemap?
3. If indexed, should I use rel="canonical" and point the ppc versions to the appropriate organic page?
Thanks,
-
Thanks Jasmine!
-
Thanks for the great response Bob!
I have decided to structure my pages along the purchase cycle like this:
brandexperience.ca/seo-professional-services > brandexperience.ca/seo-strategy > brandexperience.ca/seo-strategy-free-analysis and brandexperience.ca/seo-strategy-free-analysisB
I will index the free analysis page and use it as a conversion landing page for both SEO and SEM. I'll have a B for A/B testing and use rel="canonical" for the B to point to A. B will always be the challenger for testing.
-
Thanks Monica,
I thought about your statement - "What's wrong with PPC visitors landing on your SEO pages?" and I decided I will incorporate the PPC pages into my SEO content architecture.
-
For the reasons above, you should noindex them, but do make sure that the Google AdWords bot can crawl them - if this is the same bot as the organic bot, then don't noindex. I heard from a reliable source that noindexing will lower your ability to gain a higher Quality Score as google doesn't know what your page is about. If you are using Dynamic Search Ads then you will need to point those to the seo pages on your site, not your ppc pages.
-
If your PPC pages use a part of the content that's already on the SEO page (duplicated content) I would noindex those pages. Trying to get both pages indexed can only backfire. A other quick indication, if those pages are only attainable through your Ads and offer no new information to users who started there visit on the home page I would also noindex them.
If however, your PPC pages offer unique value to your visitors they can't find on other pages on your website (or on your organic landingpages) you could let them get indexed.
For point 2: Having a useful internal link structure is a best practice for SEO. If your pages offer unique value I would add them (in a logical way) to your internal navigation structure. If however they **do not ** offer unique value those links won't be useful for your visitors and will only be there to support your SEO. In this case it won't do you any good.
For point 3: Your building a triangle. It doesn't make sense to try to give your PPC pages any status through internal links and then giving a canonincal to merge any status with your organic pages. Either way, I would not canonical those pages. Give them noindex or treat them like a normal page.
Since this question is pretty old, I would love to know how you handled the situation!
-
Wherever you have duplicate content you should try to minimize the effects, usually with canonical tags.
I would shy away from your strategy only because showing viewers one thing and bots another is frowned upon. What's wrong with PPC visitors landing on your SEO pages?
-
Dear Steve,
I've never heard of the importance of a landing page needing to be indexed as it's a single page.
I don't know how having a landing page could be of benefit to you.
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
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Are rel=author and rel=publisher meta tags currently in use?
Hello, Do these meta tags have any current usage? <meta name="author" content="Author Name"><meta name="publisher" content="Publisher Name"> I have also seen this usage linking to a companies Google+ Page:Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | srbello0 -
Absolute vs. Relative Canonical Links
Hi Moz Community, I have a client using relative links for their canonicals (vs. absolute) Google appears to be following this just fine, but bing, etc. are still sending organic traffic to the non-canonical links. It's a drupal setup. Anyone have advice? Should I recommend that all canonical links be absolute? They are strapped for resources, so this would be a PITA if it won't make a difference. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SimpleSearch1 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
Should my back links go to home page or internal pages
Right now we rank on page 2 for many KWs, so should i now focus my attention on getting links to my home page to build domain authority or continue to direct links to the internal pages for specific KWs? I am about to write some articles for several good ranking sites and want to know whether to link my company name (same as domain name) or KW to the home page or use individual KWs to the internal pages - I am only allowed one link per article to my site. Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
De-indexing product "quick view" pages
Hi there, The e-commerce website I am working on seems to index all of the "quick view" pages (which normally occur as iframes on the category page) as their own unique pages, creating thousands of duplicate pages / overly-dynamic URLs. Each indexed "quick view" page has the following URL structure: www.mydomain.com/catalog/includes/inc_productquickview.jsp?prodId=89514&catgId=cat140142&KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=475&width=700 where the only thing that changes is the product ID and category number. Would using "disallow" in Robots.txt be the best way to de-indexing all of these URLs? If so, could someone help me identify how to best structure this disallow statement? Would it be: Disallow: /catalog/includes/inc_productquickview.jsp?prodID=* Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Do I need to use rel="canonical" on pages with no external links?
I know having rel="canonical" for each page on my website is not a bad practice... but how necessary is it for pages that don't have any external links pointing to them? I have my own opinions on this, to be fair - but I'd love to get a consensus before I start trying to customize which URLs have/don't have it included. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netrepid0 -
Rel=canonical tag on original page?
Afternoon All,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jellyfish-Agency
We are using Concrete5 as our CMS system, we are due to change but for the moment we have to play with what we have got. Part of the C5 system allows us to attribute our main page into other categories, via a page alaiser add-on. But what it also does is create several url paths and duplicate pages depending on how many times we take the original page and reference it in other categories. We have tried C5 canonical/SEO add-on's but they all seem to fall short. We have tried to address this issue in the most efficient way possible by using the rel=canonical tag. The only issue is the limitations of our cms system. We add the canonical tag to the original page header and this will automatically place this tag on all the duplicate pages and in turn fix the problem of duplicate content. The only problem is the canonical tag is on the original page as well, but it is referencing itself, effectively creating a tagging circle. Does anyone foresee a problem with the canonical tag being on the original page but in turn referencing itself? What we have done is try to simplify our duplicate content issues. We have over 2500 duplicate page issues because of this aliasing add-on and want to automate the canonical tag addition, rather than go to each individual page and manually add this tag, so the original reference page can remain the original. We have implemented this tag on one page at the moment with 9 duplicate pages/url's and are monitoring, but was curious if people had experienced this before or had any thoughts?0