PPC Landing pages and SEO landing pages query

[esendex]

We do a fair amount of work on PPC and because of this a lot of our PPC landing pages also do quite well in SEO. We are thinking that the landing pages do well because they get a lot of traffic from PPC and therefore, maybe google can index and take note of these pages quicker? The pages that usually shoot right up the rankings are new pages used for long tailed keywords.

So I have a few questions:

Does the traffic from PPC actually have any effect on SEO rankings?

If we were to create a page that was to act solely as an SEO landing page, would google take note if there was no traffic?

Would simply linking from our main site to the landing page be enough to give it a bit of authority, in which we can build upon?

Thanks in advance.

[RyanKent]

When we talk about search engine's internal policies, it is important to understand two important points:

1. Search engines do not disclose their algorithms used to compute rankings. We are making guesses. Those guesses are educated based on experience and shared knowledge, but these are not absolute truths.

2. Each search engine can operate differently with respect to any specific criteria.

With the above in mind, I am not aware of any direct means by which traffic alone affects search ranking. A page's traffic can indirectly affect the ranking in many ways:

• a user may visit your site once via PPC, then perform a search to find your site in the future and select your site from SERPs. This information can influence ranking.

• a user may visit your site then mention it in social bookmarking, email or other means which can influence rankings

• a landing page is often highly optimized to receive traffic for a given keyword or phrase. It makes sense it would perform well in SERPs for the given keyword. In a perfect world, you can offer an optimized landing page for each keyword. If you offered a site selling Ford Mustangs and you chose to run a PPC campaign targeting "Camaro" and "Camaros", the landing page would likely be a page comparing Camaros vs Mustangs. If the page offered good content, it would likely perform well in SERPs.

Does the traffic from PPC actually have any effect on SEO rankings?

Google has clearly stated PPC does not have any direct effect on rankings. There are numerous potential indirect means by which PPC can have a positive effect on SEO

If we were to create a page that was to act solely as an SEO landing page, would google take note if there was no traffic?

If by "take note" you mean would the page get indexed, the answer is yes. The page can even perform very well in SERPs for a long tail phrase.

Would simply linking from our main site to the landing page be enough to give it a bit of authority, in which we can build upon?

Yes. Links to a page add to the page's authority. Your phrasing of "link from our main site" causes me to believe the landing page is not on your main site. If your landing page is a micro site, generally the idea is to build traffic for your main site, therefore I would recommend linking from the microsite to the main site, not the other way around.

Also, if the main site and microsite are hosted with the same company, or use a common design, the value of any links between them are minimized.

[esendex]

When I say linking from the "main site", I am talking about the structure of the site.

These landing pages are on the same domain, same host and technically the same site, however they are pages that stand alone (their only purpose is for people to land on). They link from the page to the rest of the site, but there is nowhere on the navigable site to get to that page.

I was wondering if Google (in particular) would punish them for not being a big part of the main site structure. These landing pages are for search terms that are not necessarily products or services, so have no purpose being navigable to.

[RyanKent]

Thanks for the clarification.

It sounds like you have created island pages specifically for your campaign. The island pages are contained on your site and link to your site, but you cannot move from your site to the island page unless you either know the URL or enter the proper Google/Bing search.

A few things to consider:

• you can include your island pages as part of your site. If the pages are well written, have good content and otherwise add value to your site, I would recommend including the pages in your site's navigation or otherwise making them accessible.

• you could have valid reasons to exclude the page from your site. I have a client who has a page designed to address a negative publicity issue. The client does not wish the page to be reachable from his site, but he wants it to appear in SERPs so if a search is specifically designed to locate negative information about his company, that page is found and the story is shared from the company's point of view.

If you use a CMS or otherwise offer a site search function, you need to make a business decision whether to exclude this type of island page from site searches.

IIf you desire this page to be indexed, it is then critical an updated sitemap is offered to search engines. While a site with solid navigation does not need to submit a sitemap at all, a site with island pages is dependent upon sitemaps if they wish those pages to be indexed.

I was wondering if Google (in particular) would punish them for not being a big part of the main site structure.

The site isn't punished at all. The pages would not be indexed unless they are either included in a sitemap, receive an internal or external link which a crawler can read, or otherwise is made known to search engines such as social media links.

Clearly if the page is included in a PPC campaign the page is known by Google/Bing, but they keep their PPC and Organic searches separate. To the best of my knowledge a page is not indexed based solely on a PPC ad.