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Hi all;

I noticed something interesting over the break, and that was that Google News Alerts for the techwyse.com link returned one of our PPC landing pages. It should not do this, you'd think.

Should we not ensure that all landing pages have 'noindex, nofollow' rules, or is it only when requested? You'd think that these pages would have these rules as a standard step during creation.

Would love to hear feedback in this.

Matt

Good find Matt! I saw that too…

Just so you know – we moved most of our landing pages to the live site and out of the area that had no follow attached to it.

It was Robs opinion that spidered pages get preference with Google and our overall CPC would be cheaper. Im not sure of the entire explanation but that was what I had found. While the landing pages are not connected to the general site they do appear in our sitemap so they will get spidered. I would expect that 99% of all traffic will still come from PPC though.

In historical theory you are correct Matt. An inside opinion (themezoom forum) on this is, it’s good. How can we stop someone from visiting an isolated landing page and sending a link to a friend, posting it in a forum or talking about the irresistable offer on a Social network? Rumor has it Google puts more value on landing pages with incoming links (votes).



Additionally it has been tested that if you create a Squidoo lens and point to the landing page Google likes it. E.g. http://www.squidoo.com/WhatAdWordsWontTellYou (it does not point to a landing page but it could). I created this lens to see what the buzz was all about. Then I went on to create 2 more lenses http://www.squidoo.com/BounceRate (Approaching top 100 ranking in upper right) or http://www.squidoo.com/google_anlalytics_questions



I can see the traffic from these sources in analytics. I thought the concept was interesting when I read about it. I have never tested it in PPC myself, but it may be worthy of a test of our own?

Lets try to read between the lines of Googles official statement on landing page and what we can infer from it. The statement goes like this...

“The best way to figure out whether your keyword, ad, or landing page is relevant and useful is to put yourself in the shoes of a user. Do your ad and landing page include language that makes sense in the context of the keywords you have chosen? For example, if you have selected the keyword ‘hiking shoes,’ have you made sure that your ad mentions hiking shoes or related name brands? Does your landing page actually offer the name brands you mentioned, along with detailed information about this shoe type?”

“Targeting your keywords, ads, and landing pages in this way likely will lead to several positive results. First, it can help you gain the trust of your customers and therefore keep them coming back to your site.]You will also minimise the money spent on clicks from users who might not be interested in what your website offers. And finally, you can increase your overall Quality Score and lower the minimum bid necessary for your ad to appear.”

Gain the trust of your customer
A visitor to landing page with no connection to the website or about us page will want more info before he begins to trust a vendor

therefore keep them coming back to your site
Using the example above if the offer on a particular range of shoe is made only on the landing page a returning visitor or a visitor compelled by the social buzz is not going to find it unless he comes back using PPC ad.

what your website offers
Finally its about what website offers not your landing page.