Few topics can heat up a conversation between SEO professionals quite like landing pages.
Back in the early 90’s at a time when even adult eCom was only just gaining it’s footing on the web and the average business owner knew they needed a website, even though nobody really knew why – “Gateway Pages” as then they were known, became a popular digital marketing strategy.
Fuelled in part by the “rewards in your sleep” ethos of an embryonic affiliate marketing industry and the emergence of simple and easy to use CMS content management, the concept quickly caught on.
I myself had a vast network of over 1000 domains diverting and redirecting traffic to various customer’s websites. Close one page of spam and ten others would open in an endless loop, all the while exposing the users to purchasing opportunities ordered according to the diminishing potential value of their click.
I did well, indeed, many of us did. In fact it’s because of our activities that for so many years browsers like Internet Explorer ran so slowly – so much of the running resources needed to be ring-fenced to protect the user from what became know as “gorilla marketing”.
Eventually changes in the way Search Engines indexed and ranked pages put pay to our booming business. By penalising websites for spam activity Google and others forced companies to choose either the high value organic traffic that could be provided by the search engines, or the low quality often low yeilding traffic that got served up by traffic delivery networks and gateway pages. T’was a “no brainer”.
Jump forward 20 years and Cross Domain Landing Pages, as they have become known, are back. Perhaps it would be an overstatement to label them as legitimate, but landing pages are still a recognised albeit frowned upon, tool of the modern SEO Consultant.
One needs to exercise caution because they are a loaded gun and if not used correctly, landing pages can destroy the ranking of the domain you’re trying to promote. There are a few tricks of the trade that I employ which enable me to use landing techniques in certain situations.
For me they have proved effective when used as part of a wider reaching SEO strategy particularly for stubborn cases or websites that target traffic yielded from ultra-competitive keywords. In such cases when the margin between a good rank and failure is so fine, the selected use of landing pages targetting the right keywords and placed on a suitable domain, have made the difference in ranking performance to such an extent that it was, to quote my customer – “Like flicking a switch”.
Actually it was a little bit more involved than that ;P lol
If you need a web designer or an SEO consultant to help you with your domains rank please reach out me using the form at the bottom of the page.
Written by: Jon Odley, SEO Consultant