Landing pages for paid traffic and the use of noindex vs canonical
-
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?
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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
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
-
Portfolio Image Landing Page Question/Issue
Hello, We have a client with a very image heavy website. They have Portfolio pages with a large number of images. We are currently working on adding more copy to the site but wanted to confirm we are taking the right approach for the images on the site. Under the current structure each image has its own landing page (with no copy) and is fed in (or generated on) to a Portfolio Page. While we know this is not ideal as it would be best to have the images on the Portfolio Page directly or even fill out the landing pages with copy; due to the amount of images and the fact these are only images (and not a 'targeted' page) that would not really be feasible. Aside from the thin content concern these individual landing pages were being indexed so they are showing hundreds of pages on their sitemap.xml and in GSC even though they only have a few actual pages. In the meantime we went into each image-page and placed a canonical tag back to the main Portfolio Page (with the hopes to add content to that page and have it as the ‘overarching’ page). Would this be the right approach? – We considered ‘noindex-follow’ tags but would want the images to be crawled; the issue is because the pages are not on the actual page are we canonicalizing these images to nothing? Any insight would really be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R0 -
Use Canonical or Robots.txt for Map View URL without Backlink Potential
I have a Page X with lots of unique content. This page has a "Map view" option, which displays some of the info from Page X, but a lot is ommitted. Questions: Should I add canonical even though Map View URL does not display a lot of info from Page X or adding to robots.txt or noindex, follow? I don't see any back links coming to Map View URL Should Map View page have unique H1, title tag, meta des?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Will redirecting poor traffic web pages increase web presence
A number of pages on my site have low traffic metrics. I intend to redirect poor performing pages to the most appropriate page with high traffic. Example
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greyshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greenshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-redshoes all of the above will be redirected to the following page:
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes Question
Will carrying out htaccess redirects from the above example influence to web positioning of both www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes and www.sampledomomain.co.uk Regards Mark0 -
Using Canonical on home page
Our home page has the canonical tag pointing to itself (something from wordpress i understand). Is there any positive or negative affect that anyone is aware of from having pages canonical'ed to themselves?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | halloranc0 -
Any downsides of (permanent)redirecting 404 pages to more generic pages(category page)
Hi, We have a site which is somewhat like e-bay, they have several categories and advertisements posted by customers/ client. These advertisements disappear over time and turn into 404 pages. We have the option to redirect the user to the corresponding category page, but we're afraid of any negative impact of this change. Are there any downsides, and is this really the best option we have? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vhendriks0 -
Should I make multiple landing pages for different cities?
I am trying to market my company to North Carolina & West Virginia. This is a bit of a challenge since the name is "Decorative Concrete of Virginia." My idea was to create landing pages for the specific areas (Greensboro & Raleigh, NC for now).... A new landing page them that I purchased came with a plugin that would allow you to generate a ton of landing pages with little effort by replacing some elements of the landing page, depending on the URL... For example, I have these two URLs set up right now: http://www.decorativeconcreteofvirginia.com/northcarolina/test/raleigh/nc http://www.decorativeconcreteofvirginia.com/northcarolina/test/greensboro/nc My question is... Is merely changing the city in each landing page enough, or should I change some of the other content too? I was going to create one landing page for NC, and then try to include all of the cities on that one page... but perhaps it would be easier to rank if I had one for each city. Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Tim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Timvroom0 -
If we add noindex to a subdomain, will the traffic to that subdomain still generate domain authority for the primary domain?
We are trying to decide whether a password protected site, that we will noindex, should be set up as a subdomain or if it should be its own domain. The determining factor here is whether or not having that noindexed subdomain will increase domain authority since its noindexed. Any ideas???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon0 -
How does one know where to insert the right strips of coding on the right pages for Canonical Links?
On my Website, I am the only SEO optimizer wizard person. I have to teach myself everything and I get overwhelmed a lot. I recently started using SEOMOZ and on my report it stated we had duplicate page titles and that it was bad and should be fixed quickly. So I did my research and found that I needed to use canonical links to reference one page to be indexed. However my problem lies in exactly how to add this coding to my site. I greatly appreciate any help or at least looking at this question.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FrontlineMobility0