I keep reading on the internet how people are creating landing pages that alter small amounts of texts to target keywords. So that the same landing page can contain different keywords depending on which search the visitor performed.
This seems like a good idea and a lot of the articles claim this will improve your keyword quality score in adwords.
But, I can't help but wonder if Google is going to have a problem with this kind of landing page. Isn't there a chance that Google will assume the landing page is for an affiliate marketing website?
Our landing page is a standard business service. I am thinking of making it dynamic because some of our keywords have a low score, but I also worry about how Google will react.
1. cloaking. If your landing page is part of your normal website (it can be navigated to by search engines), and the amount of content that changes is significant (don't ask me exactly how much), then showing a search engine something different to what users see is a problem.
The simple solution to this is to "noindex" it and keep it as a PPC landing page only.
2. Quality score - If google can't see certain parts of the page, and those parts are strongly correlated to the search terms you are bidding on, your landing page may appear less relevant and therefore get a lower QS (and therefore more expensive clicks)
3. Tracking performance - most methods for tracking landing page performance relies on having different addresses (URLs) for each landing page variation.
If you are dead set on doing this, then be prepared to pay a little more per click, and possibly noindex the landing page.
My recommendation:
Group your keywords into tighter, more closely related groups and assign each adgroup with a unique landing page targeted to that specific group of keywords. That way you get the improved Quality score from Google and the better targeted landing pages. and on top of that you can make use of things like multi-variant testing and more accurate performance tracking so over time those landing pages will improve even more!
Using server side coding you should be able to create a bespoke landing page for each keyword, that will be perfectly acceptable to the end user and Google.
If you try to cloak affiliate links etc. then you are going to fall foul....if you get caught. You might think it worth the risk, that's your call.
As it is for PPC then it makes sense to nofollow the pages, to avoid any duplicate content issues, but having the same boiler-plate content with a few words liberally placed would not really constitute unique content, but you should be able to pull in RSS feeds, articles from article directories etc. to make it a good fit and then QS should be a whole lot better.
I was going to have the landing page target major cities. So that the keyword would be "some service new york" and that would direct the visitors to "http://www/our-service/new-york". Where the last parameter would define the city.
But, your right about the web crawlers. I would exclude the landing page from the sitemap, but I want the visitor to browse to other pages on the website.
So I'm still thinking about how to implement this.
