Landing Page & Robot.txt

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I'm hoping someone can help me sort this out...

I want to create several landing pages (LP) for my Google Ad Campaign...

However, all these LP are almost similar to each other and my home page. They have just been optimized for the specific keyword for each Adgroup that is pointing to the each LP.

I am aware that Google doesn't like it when you have duplicate pages on your website...

Now, my question is this... there are 3 boxes I can check or uncheck that tells the bots not to do some things:

1) allow the bots to visit this page (robot.txt)
2) Index this page (robots meta tag)
3) follow links on this page (robots meta tag)

I'm not too sure what to do here... because if I prevent all bots to check out my landing pages... won't that make the Google Adword bots that are checking for landing page quality scores go away?

Any advice and comments are welcome...

Thanks,

John
#website design #landing #page #robottxt
  • Hey John,

    What exactly do you mean by similar? Do all of these landing pages have exactly the same content? or just the same layout?

    Let me know, or give me some sort of idea. To stay on the safe side, I would say just try out #2 to get the pages indexed. That way at least you have the link to the page indexed and you can always change it later to edit or optimize it.

    Good Luck and God Bless
    • [3] replies
    • Hi Tashyla,

      Thanks for your quick response... basically all the landing pages are similar except for keywords in strategic places.

      For instance, supposed I had an affiliate page for a dog product.

      I could write a headline, first paragraph and swap out the breed of the dog...

      like terrier, collie and so on...

      Otherwise, all the words, pictures and tables are the same.

      Should I still allow the Google robots to index this page?
    • After thinking about it some more... the only link to these landing pages is from the Google Adword Campaign... I'm getting a little confused what you mean?

      John
    • Can you explain what you mean by "index"?
  • First, your robots.txt is "more of a guideline than an actual rule"... robots don't HAVE to ignore anything, it's just a way of suggesting that they SHOULD.

    Second, robots.txt is used to prevent robots from INDEXING your content into the search results ONLY. The adwords bot is going to rate (rate is different than index) your landing page regardless of your robots.txt file, period.
    • [1] reply
    • Since I don't want my landing pages indexed... I should just check all bot activity off?
  • Well since you are swapping out the breed of the dog, this is technically a whole different keyword. It's not much of a big deal with an adwords campaign. I've done adwords before and I dont know exactly what their terms are, so im not sure if this would be categorized as duplicate content. But here's my suggestion:

    Take your landing page, and copy and paste the content into a word pad or note pad. Just simply change, add, or subtract just one word from each sentence. This should only take a few minutes and it would make a big difference. Let me know how it works out!

    Good Luck and God Bless
  • I've just finished setting up some initial landing pages for a Google Adword campaign that I'm about to launch and I set all landing pages to noindex and nofollow because I'm aiming to find out what works best.

    If I were you, I would do this and then set the page that works the best to be spidered by the search engines.

    Jonathan
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