Are Landing Pages Not Connected to our Nav Bars considered Black Hat?
-
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!
-
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
-
Thank you Federico!
-
Thank you so much Davinia! Very helpful!
-
Thanks, Chris! Extremely helpful.
-
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.
-
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 -
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.
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
-
Google Search Console issue: "This is how Googlebot saw the page" showing part of page being covered up
Hi everyone! Kind of a weird question here but I'll ask and see if anyone else has seen this: In Google Search Console when I do a fetch and render request for a specific site, the fetch and blocked resources all look A-OK. However, in the render, there's a large grey box (background of navigation) that covers up a significant amount of what is on the page. Attaching a screenshot. You can see the text start peeking out below (had to trim for confidentiality reasons). But behind that block of grey IS text. And text that apparently in the fetch part Googlebot does see and can crawl. My question: is this an issue? Should I be concerned about this visual look? Or no? Never have experienced an issue like that. I will say - trying to make a play at a featured snippet and can't seem to have Google display this page's information, despite it being the first result and the query showing a featured snippet of a result #4. I know that it isn't guaranteed for the #1 result but wonder if this has anything to do with why it isn't showing one. VmIqgFB.png
On-Page Optimization | | ChristianMKG0 -
Understanding why our new page doesn't rank. Internal link structure to blame? + understand canonical pages more.
Hi guys. Sorry it's an essay...BUT, i think a lot of you will find this an interesting question. This question is in 2 (related) parts, and I imagine it would be an 'advanced' SEO question. Hoping you guys can help bring some real insight 🙂 Always amazed at the quality for this forum/ community. **Context... ** We had a duplicate content issue caused by this page and it's product permutations, so we placed canonical tags on all the product permutations to solve it. Worked a treat. However, we now have more **product ranges. **We now sell Diaries, Notebooks & Music books, which are clearly different from one another. So...we've placed canonical tags on all the product permutations leading back to the 'parent' theme. In other words, all the diary permutations 'lead back' to the diary page. All the notebooks permutations 'lead back' to the main notebook page. So on and so forth. Make sense so far? Context end..... Issue. Amazingly our Diary page outranks our notebook pagefor the search term 'Design your own Notebook'. The notebook page is well optimised for this search term, and the diary page avoids the word 'notebook' altogether (so no keyword cannibalisation going on). Possible reason? Our Diary page has a vast amount of internal links to it throughout our site. The notebook page has only a few. Could this be the issue? If so, what reading/ blogs/ content/ tools would you recommend to help understand and solve this problem? i.e) Better understanding internal link structure for SEO. 2nd part of the question (in the context of internal linking for SEO). When there are internal links to a page with a conical tag does that 'count' towards the 'parent page', or simply towards that specific page? I really hope that makes sense. If it's clear as mud just shout. Isaac. EDIT: All pages in question have been indexed since we added these changes to the site.
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
Should a keyword be optimized on One page only?
I have a niche website that focusses on selling pizza delivery bags, the search keywords that are used by users are about 7 and their are another 15 long tail keywords. The question is do i optimize every keyword per one page only? i have a blog on the website www.prodelpizzabags.com/blog/ if i write a blog post that would "compete" internally with another keyword, what should i do, what are the best practices I would be thankful for any insights regarding keyword/page optimization
On-Page Optimization | | akramsabra0 -
How is this page ranking?
Hi. A client of mine is being outranked by a competitor whose landing page does not include the keyword within their page content AT ALL. Nor does their URL. Nor do any image alts. And their page title features the keyword in the middle of it, not at the start. Their link profile is not great with directories and the like. They are not socially active.. I am confused! I thought content on a page absolutely had to include the keyword to get ranked for it. Here's the page: www.springsoft.ie, keyword is "water softeners" Any thoughts I would appreciate. Many thanks.Christoffa
On-Page Optimization | | Christoffa0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
Hi, I did a SEOmoz campaign and got results today, One of the results is Too "Many On-Page Links" when i am drilling down, i see that that's include inside links. for example, i sale food, i have my main department window - inside i have 30 products - each product is linked to a detailed page about the product. so automatically i have 30 links - not including all the others in this page, and i easily get over 100 and even sometimes 200 is this a big issue? does it damages my SEO? If yes, is there a way to write the HTML in a way that internal links like that wont be counted? Thank you SEOWiseUs
On-Page Optimization | | iivgi0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
If a page has more than 100 links, rather than splitting up the page into multiple pages, is it ok to use name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />? The page in question lists links to articles so the page itself isn't that important to appear in serps, but the articles are the helpful content pages: www.ides.com/articles/processing/injection-molding/
On-Page Optimization | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
Different page for each product colour?
Hi Guys, I've just read an ecommerce article that suggests it's a good idea to have a different page for each colour that the product comes in. However surely this will mean duplicate content? What are your thoughts? Have you put this tactic into motion and how did it go? Thanks, Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Sparkstone0 -
Canonical to the page itself?
Hello, I'd like to know what happens when you use canonical to the same page itself, like: Page "example.com" rel canonical="example.com" Does that impact in something? Bad or good? See ya!
On-Page Optimization | | seomasterbrasil1