Thursday, February 13, 2014

Google Webmaster Guidelines Change on February 13, 2014 at 12:23AM

This morning Google made an addition to the Technical Guidelines section of the Webmaster Guidelines (which it then removed the next day).


It simply adds:
  • Make efforts to ensure that a robots.txt file does not block a destination URL for a Google Ad product. Adding such a block can disable or disadvantage the Ad.
If you have pages built solely for PPC, I would have recommended you use a robots.txt file to remove them from the index (and now I need to make sure this isn't the case on my clients). Pages built for PPC have a specific purpose: to convert quickly. After all, you've paid for the visit (click) so you want to increase your odds to make the visit worthwhile. While you want a natural search visitor to convert, it can (and should) have more information on the page. This is why you would want to robots.txt-out your PPC page- you don't want it served-up organically.

But Google is not recommending this.

Should we be concerned that Google will start serving our PPC landing pages in the SERPs? Nah. I think Google will look at both pages and determine that the page built for Organic Search is much better to serve in the SERPs than the abbreviated page built for quick conversion that was built for Paid Search. In fact, the only reasons I can think that Google might serve your PPC landing page is that:
  1. Your PPC page is too long and not built for quick conversions
  2. Your Organic Search page is banned, penalized or flamed to the point that Google is serving up less-than optimal pages anyway
  3. You are really bad at Organic Search
In summary, it seems that everything will be okay ifremove your PPC pages from your robots.txt file. If Google is serving those pages in the SERPs as a result- you have bigger issues to fix.

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