Q and A: How do I create landing pages without creating duplicate content?

Dear Kalena...

I have a question about Google AdWords landing pages. I have done a campaign, sending people to pages on my site. I read everywhere that landing pages should reflect the ads & keywords and my web pages are too general. If I want to set up a unique landing page just for AdWords, how & where do I set it up without it being part of the main site? Because I don't want duplicate content.

As always, Thanks for your help.

Regards
Ros

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Ros

Easy peasy. Simply include NoIndex, NoFollow robots meta tags in the HTML code of your landing pages, or put them in a sub-folder like www.site.com/PPC/ and prevent search robots from indexing that folder by excluding it in your robots.txt file.


Subscribe via: Yahoo Feeds | Feedburner | Technorati | Bloglines

Q and A: Should we create domain names incorporating our major product keywords?

Dear Kalena...

We run an ecommerce site and my boss would like to take advantage of the strong demand for a couple of our products in particular. One of the ideas being tossed around is creating domain names that incorporate these keywords so that search engines find them more quickly (i.e., www.sitenameproduct1.com, www.sitenameproduct2.com)

What are your thoughts on this approach? Is this considered 'black hat' and could this get us in trouble with the major search engines?

Thanks
Kelly

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Kelly

Creating new domains for this purpose is a really, really bad idea. Although they are getting better at it, many search engines can't distinguish keywords within domain names unless they are separated by hyphens and there is really next to no ranking advantage for having keywords in a domain anyway.

It's not black hat, but it's a total myth and hasn't worked since about 2001. In fact, trying to get brand new domains ranked in Google takes up to a year now because of the aging delay so to launch new sites for this purpose is definitely not a good strategy.

You'd be much better off creating a few new pages on your existing site dedicated to the popular products and optimize them well for related keywords. For example, create some articles about the products or people's experience with the products and link to the product detail pages from within the articles using target keywords in the anchor text of the links.

Your existing site has great PageRank and link popularity and it is the best place to put content about your products. If you place a link from your home page to the new product articles/pages, that should help the search engines find the new content quickly and hopefully provide more rankings for keywords relating to those products. The other option is to boost the number of product related keywords in your pay per click campaigns and create dedicated landing pages for them so they convert better.

Add to: Digg | Del.icio.us | Ma.gnolia | Reddit

Subscribe via: Yahoo Feeds | Feedburner | Technorati | Bloglines

Q and A: How do you avoid duplicate content problems with similar landing pages?

Dear Kalena...

My question is regarding your SiteProNews article Think Global Act Global, in particular your comment:

"What he should have done was to create a separate landing page using British English spelling and shipping/contact information applicable to persons overseas".

If you create a separate landing page and it has the same content apart from spelling differences, how do you avoid the problems of duplicate content?

Ros

Kalena's Answer:

Hi Ros

Nice to hear from you again! Because of their purpose, pay-per-click landing pages can contain almost identical content, particularly if you are split testing two or more pages with only a slight change to each. For this reason, I recommend that you prevent search engines from indexing landing pages. You can achieve this by sticking a noindex, nofollow robots tag on the pages or a safer option is to stick all your landing pages into a folder on your site and instruct search engines not to index that folder via your robots.txt file.

Add to: Digg | Del.icio.us | Ma.gnolia | RawSugar | Reddit

Subscribe via: Yahoo Feeds | Feedburner | Technorati | Bloglines