Are Landing Pages Disallowed by Google/SEO?

Hi Ryan,

In your post title you ask "Are Landing Pages Disallowed by Google". The short answer to that question is absolutely not. The term landing page is what Google uses to describe the pages that that users land on when clicking on any link on their SERP. Landing pages are not only allowed they are required by Google. A landing page is any web page page that is relevant and useful to users.

However, in you post you reference a particular type of landing page, doorway pages, that Google provides as an example of web spam. And you then ask if this is "... like the quintessential idea behind what we're doing as Internet marketers, no?"

No, it isn't what you should be doing as an "Internet marketer", though some do and they are what Google classifies as web spam. Google pours a tremendous amount of resources into identifying and filtering those type of pages from there search results, so if you are trying to optimize for search engines you are going to fail, for you are doing exactly what Google targets to remove from the SERP.

So, you might ask, what should Internet Marketers do? The answer is simple, create content that is useful and needed. The more useful and needed users find it... the more Google wants to include it in their search results. Once you have created content that is both useful and needed you can then link it to other content that is also useful and needed to the readers of that page, that is what you should be doing as an Internet Marketer that is trying to promote via search engines' organic search results.

Many marketers, that embrace the web spam model, are simply trying to trick search engines into thinking that their useless, or otherwise unneeded content is good enough to be listed in search results, or that they can be trusted as a credible citation to their money pages, and they might even have temporary success.

Web spammers embrace a policy of trying to get the most results with the least effort. They typically create content that just barely passes the minimum standards as legitimate content. But it seems their success is always temporary because Google, and other search engines, will eventually adjust their standards to filter out those low quality pages..

The only way avoid the continuous devaluation of your content marketing efforts is to create content that is nowhere even close to the minimum standard that Google sets for quality, utility, and relevance. Make your content good enough to stand the test of time and make sure it is needed. Don't just re-publish the same, or essentially the same content that can already be easily found on the web. Do this and you will see greater benefits over a longer period of time.

Go ahead and create your "microsites", if you wish, just make sure they are chock full of useful and needed content, otherwise you are building your SEO on a poor foundation, and you should expect it to collapse at any moment.