Should I Link To My Landing Pages? Options

[No Spam]

Been searching for two days and cant find a good answer.

Should I link to my landing pages from the rest of my site? Will it hurt my organic listings?

I'm in the process of developing landing pages for future PPC campaigns. Each landing page targets a single or group of keywords I am bidding on. These landing pages are optimized for those keywords and are relevant to the end user. An example being I have a landing page directed to touting the benefits of my service as it relates to sys admins, another is geared to small company owners. Other landing pages are for PPC traffic from other countries, etc.

These pages don't really fit into my site layout per se (products, pricing, contact us, etc)

Currently I do not have any links TO these landing pages from the rest of my site so a visitor can only arrive via PPC. All landing pages look like and link to the rest of my site (main navigation, FAQs, etc.).

I have not linked from my other site pages to these landing pages because I don't want to run afoul of any "doorway page" rules and risk having my site penalized.

On the other hand, these pages aren't half-bad. They're optimized for specific terms, and are useful to their target audience. A SE spider might find them very relevant.

Should these pages be linked to from other pages in my site, where appropriate, in the hopes of SE placement, or should I not risk it and just link FROM these landing pages to other appropriate pages within my site?

How about including them in my sitemap?

Thanks.

[EGOL]

If these pages are cookie cutter pages, simply changing the color or model, with the rest of the pages being almost identical then they would probably be filtered from the search results. I would not link to them if they were cookie cutter pages.

However, if each page is unique and substantially different from all other pages on the site they I would definitely link to them.

[iamlost]

One point of a ppc landing page is that there is only one way in - the specific ppc ad. That way metrics are isolated and simple to work with.

If you have more than one ad linking to a landing page how do you know (easily) which ad to which page is doing what?
Similar data pollution from insite links.

You might well have links out from the landing page to try and keep those who not click on through but there should only be one way in.

Of course your conversion goals might require something different.
The usual webdev answer applies: ys, no, maybe.

[sanity]

Would it muck up your analysis if you linked to the - ie make it harder to track where the traffic came from? I'd probably leave hem as PPC landing pages myself. There's no reason you can't create landing pages for your organic SEO campaigns that are targeted to the visitor and fit with the rest of the design.

[No Spam]

Thanks All,

I was mainly concerned about getting penalized for possible doorway pages (even though pages are not cookie-cutter) and forgot to consider a main reason for having landing pages in the first place - tracking traffic and effectiveness of PPC campaigns. What a n00b.

I think I'll not link to them but instead develop additional targeted pages for SEO as sanity suggested. More work but probably a better, cleaner result.

Again thanks. Glad I found the forum.

[sanity]

Glad to have you stop by No Spam.