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For years I have been under the impression that landing pages were a bad thing in google. Well, recently I had to eat my words, as I watched someone get a landing page listed in Google in under 24 hours, without any blackhat techniques.
OK, the page was optimised like a mother f*cker, but, the point is, I thought this was frowned upon by the big G in search engine land. Guess not….
The snag for me, is that a landing page isnt really great from a visitor point of view. From a search engine point of view, fine, but if a visitor came to a site I was promoting, they would take one look and leave. WHY I hear you ask. Well, because the pages I promote are not affiliate programs and products, nor my own products. The pages are real peoples small business websites, predominantly in the tourism industry. We are talking guesthouses, car rental companies etc. The reall problem is that they dont really understand how things work, and all they want, is to know why they are not on page 1, in the first position for a broad term like, accommodation, or car hire!
If a person Like me had to use a landing page, using the same method I saw recently, it would get placed well in goolge, but better than the real page? Who knows?
If history is anything to go by, then google would rank the real page higher than the landing page, because of its content.
What I witnessed was a landing page of about 5 paragraphs get ranked inside the top 10 on google, within 24hrs, simply by some optimisation, and well placed links to the website.
What does this mean to ‘real’ company websites? Should we be making these landing pages? Is this what the blackhat cloaking pages are all about? It seems that would be the solution, a page for the engines, and a page for the ‘real’ people.
Does google frown on the landing page, or the cloaking of the landing page?
Things are starting to look a bit fuzzy for me on this front right now.
For now I will be sticking to the proven methods I am already using, while keeping one eye on the ‘new’ developments I have recently seen. Maybe it was a fluke, but I am not gonna take the chance.