Thin sites vs content driven sites
Submitted by chassm on Thu, 06/26/2008 - 05:08.
I'm very well aware that Google is going to be keen to throw a smack down on those who dare promote a thin site through their precious adwords network, I'm also aware that MSN and Yahoo are a little more tolerant of such. During week 2 I believe, Jeremy went over a couple of the sites he was currently working on or promoting. The one about laptops and the VOIP site, both looked pretty thin to me. My questions are, how much content did those two sites get when they were done? and how do you add enough content to sites like that to get Google's approval?
I see these landing pages all over the net promoting products and they look really thin yet they have a PR rating. I'm interested in producing good content, don't get me wrong, but I'm really not getting how you add content to pages like that. All these templates I see available have that look where there's an area for the main product, then the sales letter text but there's no menu and the overall feel of the pages I'm seeing don't really invite content, it's more like splash window.
Anybody else notice this?
Don't over look the fact
Don't over look the fact that Jeremy also mentioned he spent less on Google vs MSN and Yahoo!, in several of his niche's.
Although Google would like to, they don't own the internet, and their definition of a "thin site", that they slap out of their AdWords game, can go on to achieve huge profits via MSN or Yahoo! traffic.
Also, a page rank of 1 or 2 usually means Google recognises the page for what that page claims to be, meaning the url, meta data, title tags, etc. all jive and are relative and consistent to the prying eyes or the Google bots.
Google and Ranking
Like it or not, Google is the #1 search engine and if you want to get ranked well by Google then you better have a content driven site.
Personally, I am not a fan of thin sites. Why would I visit a thin site if there is no content? Sure, you can offer a discount on a product you are promoting but that only gets you so much traffic.
If you want consistent traffic with repeat visitors, then a content driven site is the only game is town.
The advantages of content driven sites far outweigh that of thin sites.
Why do you think Jeremy is scaling down from 100 sites to a dozen sites?
Dan
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Integrating landing pages into content site
Ok, so let's say that you want to do a full content site in order to make Google happy. The way we have been taught to do landing pages in the Black Ink Project is to make the conversion path as narrow as possible in order to direct the visitor to the call to action. One of the recommendations is to not include any navigation on these pages (other than the footer items like contact, about, privacy policy).
My question then, is if there is nothing linking to these pages that have been specifically designed for conversions via PPC from the content site, does Google still see the content site when considering the landing page for it's quality score? If it doesn't, it could definitely slap a thin landing page with high minimum bids, even though there is a decent site in behind it on the same domain.
In the flowchart Jeremy did in one of his sessions, the landing pages just seem to be part of the site. But do the content pages actually link to these landing pages?
Just wanted to address one thing..
I don't believe there is such a thing as a "thin LP" However, a "thin" site, say 5 pages, is what Google doesn't like for organic search results. One of the main things you will hear about SEO, is that Google loves lots of fresh content, thats why blogs are easier to get ranked quicker. My personal blog went from PR 0 to PR 3 in about 4 months.
Brian Weaver - Affiliate Marketer in Training
@profwebs on twitter
Brian Weaver on Facebook
This a good question too ajs!
This is also one of the things I meant to ask when I posted this new thread. I'm understanding that the home page of a site should not be the landing page, unless there really is a way to do this successfully, I thought that was not a good idea.
If you have a site full of content about .. let's say doing your own electrical work at home, and then you create a landing page for ebooks and reference material about the subject, but then you decide to use a landing page template that's different from your home page and the rest of your site, is this a good approach? If it's all under the same domain name it seems like this would be ok to do. But like AJS asks what about the linking of landing pages to the content of the site or viseversa?
Well, I'm new to all of this...
However, you have a couple of choices when designing landing pages. You can design them roughly in appearance to your own site. You can also make them resemble the merchants site/landing page to help "ease the transition" from your site to the merchants site. However, as Jeremy stated, Google doesn't like this, so, if you are doing ppc via Google, then you might want to make the LP resemble your own site.
MSN and Yahoo don't seem to mind which the LP resembles, so you should base your decision on where and how you plan to promote the LP.
As for links from the content portion of your site, I don't see a problem with this and I actually think it would be beneficial, especially when considering Google's quality score and organic rankings. ( I could be wrong on this, so don't quote me). If it were me, I would link out to the LP from whatever part of the sites content that closely matched the offer and keywords on the LP. For example, a recent merchant I was promoting had a horrible landing page, so I changed the outgoing URL in the banner to send users to my landing page 1st, then on to the merchant. This way, I feel, I "pre-sold" the product and even saw a couple of quick conversions from it after I had to cease doing ppc on the offer.
The reason you don't want your sites nav menu on your LP, is that you want to present your customers with as few options as possible in effect helping them to do what you want them to do.
Brian Weaver - Affiliate Marketer in Training
@profwebs on twitter
Brian Weaver on Facebook
Single LPS vs. content site LPs
It's confusing to determine how to integrate the landing pages, because of it's purpose. If the site was just a content site, then there is no issue with integration. Your site would have content pages, and would be fully navigational, but your conversions would be lower because the visitor will lose focus. If you make as direct a landing page as possible, the conversions will be higher, but Google may not like it.
So, do we make landing pages as direct as possible and hope Google doesn't slap them, or do we insert then seamlessly into a content site and risk dilution of our conversions? I think I am looking more towards forming a strategy for page creation.
I agree with it being confusing
It's a bit of a guessing game. I also have a personal finance blog, which I haven't updated recently, but there are a couple of affiliate products there that I'd like to promote via adwords, and even though the blog is PR2, I'm not confident that the overall content of the blog which deals with credit cards, bankruptcy and identity theft is going to make google happy if I was going to promote an identity theft protection product. I have a category for this Identity theft but when the landing page is crawled by the bot, it will help itself to the rest of the content on the blog will it not? And when it does it will make a determination as to how relevant the entire blog is to the product I'm promoting via adwords.
So the landing page techniques that Jeremy taught on week 2 seem to not apply to Google at all, in other words we probably should not promote these via Adwords, I'm very interested in learning more about MSN and Yahoo now that it's clear that Google will not stand for just enough content.
As far as LPs, If I really wanted to promote this one post on my blog that deals with ID theft, then it sounds like I would want to create a separate LP instead, where I include the header part of the blog but maybe take out the sidebars and any other menu items that might divert the attention of the user, but still include links like "home", "about us" and such, at the footer of the LP, so the bot has a way to find the rest of the blog. Does that sound like a good approach?
Thanks for your inputs so far.
It seems like...
It seems to me you think that Jeremy somehow suggested in his LP session that you can create a site that is nothing but a single landing page? <---- correct me if I am wrong
Also, if you are driving traffic to your landing page with PPC and you don't have a navigation
on your landing page, how with the visitor lose focus because of the sites content. He or she has only clicked on an Ad and gotten to your landing page, if there are no links to your content, how will they even know about it?
Google being the dominate search engine on the web, usually has more stringent rules for both ppc and SEO. SEO wise the other 2 usually lag behind by about 2 years. I know we are discussing LP's but I'm just explaining Google a little bit. When designing a landing page, or SEOing your site for organic traffic, if you do what Google wants you will be fine on the other 2 engines.
Also, you can create 2 landing pages (or even more) to promote a single offer. You might design one that fits the theme of your own site to use with your Adwords campaign and another that you use for Yahoo and Adcenter ppc campaigns.
Nope, unless the bot (or web crawler) that is used for determining quality score works differently than others. A bot finds and indexes pages on your site by "crawling" the content and when it finds a link, it goes to that page and so on. So if it lands on your landing page 1st, and you don't have links to the content of your site then no, even if it would be bad that it did, which it would not be.
Without researching the "identity theft" niche I'd say using your PR 2 blog is an excellent idea. I have no idea how competitive the niche is so I'm only giving advice related to this post. I could have a site with 1,000 pages and it be a PR 8 and that would be better to throw a llanding page on than a completely new site in my opinion.
As for the links in the footer, you only want to inclue what Jeremy suggested... a privacy policy, affiliate disclosure, and I can't think of the others right now, it's late here, possibly about us? , but no link to "home" or other content.
I'll close this with a couple of paragraphs from Jeremy's unofficial quality score document.
You can download the whole document in the learning center here on the site.
Also, I suggest you download High Performance Affiliate Marketing if you haven't already, and read sections 4.6 and all of section 6. Actually, if you haven't read it all yet, you should. The info in the sessions were closely aligned with the book.
Hope this helps and if any of the more experienced folks here find something I said that was wrong, please don't hesitate to correct me :)
Brian Weaver - Affiliate Marketer in Training
@profwebs on twitter
Brian Weaver on Facebook
Thanks Brian
Well I have not ruled out the option of promoting this product with my blog. It's going to take some more writing though that's for sure.
Thanks for your input.
It seems to me you think
It seems to me you think that Jeremy somehow suggested in his LP session that you can create a site that is nothing but a single landing page? <---- correct me if I am wrong
// It seems that way, although I know he advocates full content sites now. The full content site model seems to exist in contrast to what is being taught about doing a streamlined LP.
My questions were directly solely considering PPC. If you were to consider SEO, then what to do is self explanatory in my opinion.
I think it really just comes down to testing. Although it would be great to have the 'correct' answer from the get go, it just doesn't work that way.
profwebs - thank you for your insights on this
I think I'll ask my question
I think I'll ask my question in another way:
Is it possible to have a single landing page that can pass from Google AdWords scrutiny? This landing page would have the links in the footer, but would otherwise be one page, yet contain ample content. Is this OK, rather than having an entire site which would need to be filled with content that does not directly help you pre-sell (i.e. articles and such)?
Taking it further, you could have several different landing pages to match your ad groups, but as a collective, they wouldn't constitute a site.
Thoughts?
I think it would probably
I think it would probably work if you had original content that is not found on the affiliate site.
You could add articles, comments, testimonials, audio, video, comparisons, etc., to each landing page. I think it's all about adding value. The question is, would the Google bot see it that way without a fair amount of additional content to back it up.
http://www.quityourdayjob.com
http://www.quityourdayjob.com/node/1148
This thread will answer many of the above questions.
As I said, Google may be #1, but they aren't the only 1 Dan(this is not a cheap shot at your above post).
Too much time can be spent kissing Googles ass, instead of taking your ppc dollars elsewhere and making a profit...at least for now.
All options must be weighed to the best of ones ability.
I'm really beginning to agree with this...
When I first started doing this, all I had in focus was to make Google happy and in doing so I got slapped.
I've decided to easy myself into Google Adwords form now on, and I'm going to start all my campaigns on MSN and Yahoo, they will also let you know when there's something wrong with your quality, but they won't shut you down like Google. They are also a little more responsive, especially MSN. So that's going to be my starting point from now on.
I agree. I think I will do
I agree. I think I will do the exact same thing. I'll include Google AdWords, but if they slap a campaign, I won't need to worry too much about it because Yahoo and MSN will still be running. If any given offer proves itself, I can then just expand the LP to a site, then try to reinclude Google.
Be consumer/useru-oriented when design LP
I guess the most most important point Jeremy mentioned in this session is "user, user and user" and after all this is what really google wants for it's users. Think what value have you added into the value chain when bring that visitor to your site. I mean, the term "Thin" landing page really has a negative connotation, and what really defines "thin"? Is it the quantity of your landing page in your site? Does include more pages upgrading to a better content site? And ironically does giving more content simply making it a better site/LP? I don't think so, what really matters is how users will appreciate the content. Never put more content just for the sake of adding content for google or whatever.
Suppose you are doing dodgey search arbitrage. You find out google will slap you hard. Now you include dozens of news feeds, and all kinds of crap matched to the keyword you drive to your LP for the sake of making the LP more content and quality. Are you adding value to your users now? Absolutely not. Users don't need all those kind of crap.
So i think concerning on avoiding google slap when designing LP is the wrong standing point, rather we should focus more on what you site/LP will benefit your users whether they are "thin" or "fat", I mean those long sales letter is really thin, but they get great PR, don't they?
I hope what i said make some sense...
victor