Landing pages for paid traffic and the use of noindex vs canonical

[ostesmorbrod]

A client of mine has a lot of differentiated landing pages with only a few changes on each, but with the same intent and goal as the generic version. The generic version of the landing page  is included in navigation, sitemap and is indexed on Google.

The purpose of the differentiated landing pages is to include the city and some minor changes in the text/imagery to best fit the Adwords text. Other than that, the intent and purpose of the pages are the same as the main / generic page. They are not to be indexed, nor am I trying to have hidden pages linking to the generic and indexed one (I'm not going the blackhat way).

So – I want to avoid that the duplicate landing pages are being indexed (obviously), but I'm not sure if I should use noindex (nofollow as well?) or rel=canonical, since these landing pages are localized campaign versions of the generic page with more or less only paid traffic to them. I don't want to be accidentally penalized, but I still need the generic / main page to rank as high as possible...

What would be your recommendation on this issue?

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Kenneth,

I think it depends on whether you truly operate as a local business within that city location.

If you intend to advertise to a specific city then the intent changes from finding you on a national level to finding you at a city specific level. If you truly operate (and you haven't said) from that city location then you could really optimise the page as city specific so would rank highly in that local area.

You could make the page different from the national page by including photos of the city with appropriate Alts and a little about the city itself. You'd find it relatively easy to rank at a local level for the page.

If you do not operate at City level (with a local office) and are a national company simply targeting a specific city to sell to then I would canonicalize the page back to the generic. It begs the question though why you would want a city focused page in the first place and why the national one wouldn't suffice.

I hope that clears (and not muddies!) your thinking!

Regards

Nigel

[ostesmorbrod]

Thanks, that's a valid point!

I've also seen Rand's great whiteboard Friday post. And one issue comes to mind:

If the pages used for PPC campaigns have the same intent as the generic, with relevant actions/conversions for the customer, shouldn't these signals be available to Google? Hence rel=canonical would be the best solution? Or?...

Rand did not mention a case like this as I recall, and I guess I'm not the only one with campaign pages...

Thanks for replying to this! It's an interesting issue for my client.

[Alick300]

Hi Kenneth,

If your landing page is only for Paid campaign then you can no-index and nofollow because there is no impact of no-index and nofollow on PPC landing page as well the QS.

but if you are using for both PPC and SEO then you should use rel=canonical and here is latest video on rel ="canonical"

Hope this helps.

Thanks

[andy.bigbangthemes]

In my opinion, I would also noindex nofollow since these pages don't provide any true value when compared to the main one. I'm actually curious to see what others say here.

Rand did a really good whiteboard friday on this recently -> https://moz.com/blog/rel-canonical it may solve your question.

Have a good day