Landing Pages seen as search engine spam?

landing pages

[localryebread]

My company works with local franchises, we help them drive more leads via search marketing. We do not work directly with the franchisor (corporate).

In order to maximize conversion, we build a different version of the franchises's local site which is optimized for conversion. We host the site on our servers, and currently DO NOT allow the sites to be indexed by search engines.

My question is this: How different does the content have to be from the original site (usually which is hosted by the corporate franchise) to not be considered spam? For obvious reasons, we'd like to allow these mini-sites we are building to be indexed.

[Phrasebase]

Good question, I've been trying to figure this out myself for some time now. My hunch and experience tells me there's 2 factors involved here... a) the percentage diffence between a mini-site and a main-site (as you are inquiring about) but also b) the percentage of your website's content that consists of mini-site data.

In other words, just to throw out rough numbers as an example, if you have a website, and just 5% of the content is a simplified copy of another website/webpage.. well, I'd say that it can be 95% similiar to the other website/webpage, and you won't get penalized in the least bit.

Likewise, if you had a website where 95% of the content was a simplified version of the content from other websites, but there's a only 5% similarity between the way you present it and how it's presented on the other websites, then again, I'd say you won't run a risk of getting penalized. This is the business model of social bookmark websites.

So I think these two forces need to balance one another out. Obviously, if you have mini-sites that are 80% similar to the main site, and 80% of your websites content consists of these mini-sites, well, I'd say you run the risk of getting penalized by the big G.

[cabowabo]

If they are true landing pages then they are for PPC traffic only and you should exclude them from being indexed by the engines anyway.

[localryebread]

Landing pages are landing pages, they should (or could) apply to natural search as well, in my opinion. In this case the only issue should be duplicate content. My $0.02.