Duplicate Content on Landing Pages

Does "Duplicate Content" on Landing pages have a negative effect on ranking

[kinley]

Hey there !

Generally, Landing pages have quite similar content as you cannot have unique content for 10 different landing pages for a particular product/service.

If we have similar content but different page heading for all our landing pages, would this attract penalties ?

Or is it OK to have similar content on our landing pages?

What is the "Best Practice" in regards.

Thanks in advance !

[ergophobe]

It depends on the purpose of the landing page. If they are all similar and they are just landing pages to track different ad campaigns and so forth, you can exclude them in robots.txt, make them noindex, and do not have any inbound links to the except from the campaign itself.

[kinley]

These Landing pages are there to generate leads for a product/service using web forms.

I would not like to exclude the robots as we want the landing pages to appear in organic search as well.

Can we have these landing pages on an entirely different site with a different domain name (example .net extension of the same domain name)? The content on these landing pages would be 80% similar to each other. And by allowing robots to index these landing pages, they have a chance to appear in organic results as well.

Would this help in any way? Or is there a better way of doing this ?

[phranque]

it sounds like you are describing Doorway pages:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2721311 [support.google.com]

[ergophobe]

kinley, I don't want to be too rough on you, but I could paraphrase your question as follows: "Can we publish duplicate content, but not have it be seen as duplicate content?"

I think the answer is: it depends. You can spin it, you can change it and push the limits. But in general, most people I know who have landing/doorway pages optimized for visitors coming in from specific offers/keywords/etc are going to have landing pages as orphans (not linked from the main site), noindex, and excluded in robots.txt.

What I usually see is a few good content pages for organic, and then specific landing pages that are not in the SERPs that are for paid search landing pages.

[kinley]

Thanks as always guys for all your help :)

[Austin80ss]

It's not okay for landing pages, try to use unique content generators or ask local SEO specialists.