Site Customisation - Urgent Input Required!

[xerox432]

Hello,

We are currently setting up a way of customising a client's site based on PPC campaign. I am wondering whether or not there are any SEO issues we need to be aware of.

Overview

Our client’s site, as accessed by a user through Google Organic, will be the complete site; the same site Googlebot will see.

The site, as accessed by a user through a particular Google Adwords campaign, will return a customised version of the site.

How the Customisation is Happening

The Adwords campaign will be set up to target a particular region, using Adwords’ built-in location targeting.

Its ads will link to pages on the regular site, but each URL will be appended with a URL parameter that will trigger the customisation. A cookie will also be planted in these users’ browsers to ensure that the customisation continues as the user browses from page to page on the site.

The majority of the content will be the same but the site will promote a particular store of the client, one local to the searcher. Other stores won’t be promoted on this customised version of the site.

SEO Thoughts

All pages will have canonical tags on them referencing the original, unmodified version of the page.

I personally can’t see any issue with regard to SEO because we are approaching this in the spirit of helping the user. But with launch on the horizon I am starting to worry slightly and would welcome the feedback from anyone else here – are there any SEO issues that may arise from this?

[ForForce]

Nope, you've done everything right...  I don't see any potential for penalties.

[xerox432]

Great, thanks.

I should add that what we are doing is solely for the benefit of their PPC campaign. We aren't interested in any improvement in SEO, but what we are trying to make sure we do is that there is no potential for negative impact on SEO.

To that extent we are thinking of adding a NOINDEX to those customised pages that are created using the URL parameter - just to make sure they are kept out of the index and can't be construed as any SEO spam.

Thoughts?

[ForForce]

Since the pages are mostly the same except for the feature store, your already doing the right thing with the canonical tags.  This won't be seen as any type of seo spam.

There's no reason to go the NOINDEX route, which may stop 'link juice' from flowing to the original version (marked with your canonical tags) if someone should happen to link to the special (regional) version of the site.

[xerox432]

Great point! Thank you.

The only other safeguard I can think of doing is to tell Googlebot, via Webmaster Tools, to not crawl any URLs with URL parameter added.

[ForForce]

Here's a MOZ staff reply to that exact question