Our PPC campaigns (Google Adwords for instance) link to landing pages that are NOT part of our site. The pages are flagged NOINDEX. In fact, there are no links at all to our site from the landing pages. They give the consumer one option... click here to transact. But our PPC campaigns are targeting very specific stuff.

If your PPC campaign is targeting broad, general terms like "TV" (which are typically people who have just started researching a purchase) you might want to send them to content on your site that describes all the different types of TVs out there (LCD, Plasma, HDTV - 720p, 1080i, 1080p, etc) so that you can educate them in hopes that when they are ready to buy, they come back to your site.

If your PPC campaign is targeting narrow terms like "Samsung HDTV Model 829393", someone clicking on this is more likely ready to transact. So make that be their only option.

There was an excellent session at Pubcon about landing pages. The jest of it seemed to be "Don't give your consumer options on the landing page if you want to increase your conversion. The more options you give them the less likely they are to transact."

[edited by: ZydoSEO at 8:48 am (utc) on Dec. 16, 2007]

Thanks for that, ZydoSEO.

I'm wondering, do you use the NOINDEX tag because you're afraid your landing pages will negatively impact the PR of the hub site?

My site sells over 4000 widgets and in some cases has large selections of, say, navy blue widgets. Seems like I'd be better off in my case sending them to my site so they could choose from all my navy blue widgets. Or maybe have my landing page display all my navy blue widgets.

We use NOINDEX now because we don't want affiliate links to our landing pages to show up in the SERPs. Maybe some companies don't mind competing with their own affiliates on organic search. We have lots of affiliates who link to our landing pages, each w/ a different URL identifying them similar to:

http: //www.domain.com/landing-page.asp?affiliateid=12418

Our affiliates have links to these pages on their sites. So because each affiliate's URL is different it's not likely that the landing page would ever rank any way.

We do have some older landing pages showing up in SERPs due to affiliate links. But we're fixing that over time.

[edited by: caveman at 2:00 am (utc) on Dec. 18, 2007]
[edit reason] Delinked link. [/edit]