Index or Noindex PPC Landing Pages?

[ShivaS]

Hi all,

We have thousands of PPC landing pages for our products. Usually, these pages are very similar and may differ only slightly for the keyword in question.

The landing pages are sitting in a sub-domain of our site.

From SEO perspective, assuming we don't want to get hit by Panda, Penguin and other animals Google stuffed into its ranking algorithm...Is it a good idea not to index these landing pages at all (i.e. add meta robots - noindex, nofollow to these pages)?

What say you?

Thanks!

[Jinx14678]

I think the answer would be Noindex, but continue to follow - So not by Robots, do by Meta.

Since these pages are just duplicates of others, with little content difference - I would suggest this due to at some point these could begin to drag down the rest of your site - and also they are technically creating competition for your specifically ranked non PPC product pages.

I think Pre Panda/Penguin - the advice might have been closer to keeping them, and targeting them for secondary keywords, but not sure if that strat is really good anymore as it brings too much risk, for an un-known pay off now.

IMHO

[Dr-Pete]

I'd agree but probably feel a bit more strongly about it - post-Panda, these kinds of pages can definitely cause you harm (depending on the scope). If you're not linking to them and they're off on a sub-domain, they may not be creating any practical issues, but it's still better to prevent problems. META NOINDEX probably is a good bet here for prevention.

[ShivaS]

Thanks for your help guys!

We're going to implement it right away.