How to link back to our main site from landing pages without getting penalized

[matthewbyers]

I work for a small family insurance agency in CA and I am trying to learn how to compete in this extremely competitive industry. One of the ideas we had was to purchase all the long-tail keyword urls we could and use them as landing pages to direct traffic back to our primary site. (ex. autoinsurancecity.com).

Our thought was that we could put landing pages on each that looked almost identical to the main page and use the navigation in the landing pages as links to direct traffic to the applicable category pages on the main site. (Ex. autoinsurancecity.com -> mainpage.com/auto-insurance).

My concern is that I want to make sure we don't tick off Google. Implementing this strategy would result in each of the category pages getting lots of links from the landing page navigation very quickly. I don't think the links will be worth much from an SEO perspective, but I don't want them to look like spam either.

Any suggestions on if this sort of tactic would put us at risk of being penalized? If so, does anyone have any suggestions on a better way to implement a strategy like this?

Thank you in advance for the help! I'm totally new to this and any advice goes a long way!

[Desiree-CP]

Hello Matt,

What you are doing sounds a lot like doorway pages and you will definitely be flagged if not penalized for it.  Aside from the fact that it's frowned upon by search engines, it is also bad for user experience as well.

For example, if I am on shopping.com and start clicking around their navigation bar, I would expect to be situated in the same domain.  However, if I found myself suddenly on amazon.com, that would be a cause for concern and frustration.

You can try to game the search engines by creating identical pages but it's most likely they will see through this via your source code, c-block ip, linking profile, etc. as these patterns become apparently pretty quickly.

[matthewbyers]

That makes perfect sense. I'll have to come up with a different strategy. I'm glad that I asked!

Thank you!

[SEOPA]

Agreed with CafePress.

You can still focus on long-tail, but on your own domain. So www.familysite.com/long-tale-insurance-page.html etc

I'd definitely focus on long tail and also local modifiers. Insurance is probably one of the top 5 most competitive (from an SEO perspective) businesses. Would recommend not focusing your entire marketing portfolio on SEO. may be some great social opportunities, especially if you're local/regional.

My 2 cents.

[matthewbyers]

Thanks for the advice! We will definitely continue focusing on the long-tail on our site.

We definitely aren't focusing solely on SEO for our business. It's tough, especially since I am teaching myself from scratch, so it is just one of the many ways we are trying to compete. Our hope is that in the long term it can be one of the many ways we drive new business.

Thanks!