Noindex PPC landing pages or optimise for SEO?

[Ria_]

Organic seems to be down YoY on one of the categories of a large ecommerce website that I work on. This particular category has multiple landing pages set up for PPC consisting of filtered products. So these landing pages are prone to duplicate content due to the products listed.

e.g.

• Blue Thingamajigs
• White Thingamajigs
• Black Thingamajigs
• High Gloss Thingamajigs
• Oak Thingamajigs
• Glass Thingamajigs
• etc

These landing pages do well for PPC, but are nowhere to be seen in organic (51+). The main category page however ranks quite well for quite a variety of root and longtail keywords, though not as well as it used to. For example, it does rank for "thingamajigs", "white thingamajigs", "white gloss thingamajigs" and "white gloss thingamajigs with cherries on top".

Would it benefit the main category page if the PPC landing pages were noindexed? Or, despite Google's preference for the main category, work on further optimising the landing pages for SEO? Or is there another solution that I'm completely overlooking? (It is a Friday afternoon after all...)

[erikabarbosa]

Hi Ria,

This is difficult to answer without reviewing the actual pages in question, but I’ll answer this with my general approach.

I see the approach to PPC and SEO pages as different for the most part. There are instances where it makes sense to use an actual website page as the destination; it just really depends on the product/business.

The PPC pages should be tightly woven with the ad groups and keywords, and sometimes “non-PPC landing pages” are too distracting with everything else on your website considering you are paying for each click.

If you take the above approach, then I would noindex the PPC landing pages as they probably contain content that is duplicated from your website.

Hope this helps. I’m also happy to look at specific examples. It’s very hard to say why organic traffic is down without understanding more about the actual situation.

[Ria_]

Thank you, Erika. That is very helpful.

I might suggest to the developers then that we add functionality to the CMS for landing pages to have a simple noindex check box that when ticked will add the noindex tag to that particular page so it can be implemented on a case by case basis.

[erikabarbosa]

Sure thing! Many times that functionality is already built into the CMS, so it may already exist.

For PPC landing pages, it's typically fine to use a "noindex, follow" as well.

[Ria_]

Our clients have bespoke CMS's developed in-house, with additional functionality built in if a client needs something different. But I think it would be a great idea to ask our developers if we could start making this standard across all new websites. Definitely seems like something that will make life a lot easier in future...

Thanks again for your help!