Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
This does make sense in both directions: It would be "unfair" to tank the natural ranking of advertisers in order to make more profit by the ads, and it would also be "unfair" to reward them. Quality instead of money should determine the SERPs, I think we all agree on this.
But what about the details of the landing pages?
We currently follow both lines: For many many keywords we still have respectable spots in the organic serps, but since spot 1-3 are nowadays taken by adwords-ads we additionally place these.
Now, what I observe quite often is this: For some reason google's organic serps do not show the ideal page for the targeted keyword, but instead some more general informational pages or - in many cases - the mere domain. The reason is simple: product pages are relatively thin of text, but googlebot has detected a high relevance sitewise.
Now IF my domain comes up in the organcis anyways AND IF I placed ads for the keyphrase in question: Don't you think the ranking algo should take a closer look additionally at adwords data and the target-URL specified there? Not in terms of the ranking-position, but in terms of the detailed landing-page proposed.
For the benefit of the visitor?
Also, it would impact Google's monetisation of the organic SERPs gave the same result as Adwords. If they did, I would bid low on Adwords, trusing that the best result would show on O-SERPS, withoug having to pay for the referal. Unless you are sugesting that Google only modified the O-SERPS of Adwords had won the bid?
Seeing a weak landing page in the SERPs for a specific product is something that gets mentioned quite regularly here ( see [webmasterworld.com...] for a current example). Clearly Google has a challenge in this area, and that means webmasters and SEOs also have a challenge. All kinds of "signals" come into play, and some of touchy areas seem to be 1) anchor text on internal links, and 2) thin content on the product pages.
Plz excuse my unconventional quoting. I think you clearly underestimate
a) the effect of being prominent twice or even with three links on the result-page
b) the fact that you cannot cover ALL relevant keyphrases on one landingpage (whereas you can stuff each adwords-group with hundreds of phrases if you want, and they will all show up).
Even with perfect SEO, adwords may give you something.
(At least on a comercial site.)
> Many people create Adwords landing pages that they do not allow into the Google index.
So do I in a way: As I mentioned elsewhere before, I use a structure like www.mydomain.com/mylandingpage.html?needle=adwords in order to distinguish and track adwords visitors from organics on the mere html-page. (All html-pages run through the php-parser and an initial php-routine extracts the get-variable).
I'm somewhat surprised myself that the first test-pages this year did not run into a duplicate-content-filter. Data is still very small, so I wouldn't recommend this to others, it's riding the razor blade. (And my analysis will fail as soon as the first of these needle-urls are found as backlinks in forums or elsewhere.) But for the time being it works. Keep things simple.
I think the main reason why people may not want adwords-landingpages be indexed, will be tracking issues. Not everyone (including me) wants to implement analytics. For whatever reasons. But wihtout it, tracking becomes extraordinarily difficult, particularly if you allow the search-network as well. It is very hard to decipher the referer URLs - if transmitted at all.
My basic thesis is: Adwords Data might have a positive effect on user experiences without letting money influence the organic serps: It may very efficiently help to finetune the landingpage of a site already detected as relevant on a broader level. But we as site owners want to know, where our visitors come from. The structure I currently use is a very bad and risky workaround.
In a way yes, but not that easy:
It means that the human editorial review of the site-owner, who precisely defines the landing page by hand in his adwords account, will always be better than any algorithm.
This is only natural.
In a similar way, human editorial review is for quite some time now being used to improve image-recognition under [images.google.com ]
What I propose is, that goolge might use this data (=this editorial effort) for improving the ranking-algo with respect to the detailed landing page. It would have no impact on ranking domainwise.
Or do you see any way such a cherry on the cake could be SEO-abused?
Any brand-specific or variations of longer tail / alternative keywords and non-ranking keywords I run Ad words and setup an Ad group for each page.
I do it this way for more control over the landing page, clarity.
