Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Seo Suicide - Landing Website With Just 3 Links?

Posted by Anonymous on 8/22/2011 at 8:44 AM ET 250 Points
How should you set up a “landing website” to re-direct customers to a company's three different wholly owned subsidiaries--- WITHOUT DESTROYING the Google page ranking? Use sub-domains, and if so, how?

PROBLEM

1) You have a “landing website” with no almost no content. All it has on it are three links to your “real” websites with content, videos, etc. My understanding is that SEO WILL “PUNISH” THE LANDING WEBSITE FOR LACK OF CONTENT AND FOR BEING STATIC – no changes or updating. Therefore people do not find it.

If you have three different websites for the different businesses as stand-alones, they divide the search activity among them, weakening SEO.

HYPOTHETICAL EXAMPLE, to make the question clearer:
Joe “triple threat” entrepreneur, TTT for short, wants to promote the TTT brand name (Timely Terrific Thrills) in different businesses, thinking of Porsche cars, Porsche Design accessories and Porsche Engineering services.

The thriving TTT businesses are 1) Helicopter rentals, in German and English, mostly aimed at German speaking Europe. 2) Scuba diving in French and Swahili aimed primarily at Francophone Africa and 3) Adventure and drama ballads in Hindu and Sanskrit, aimed at customers in India.

Some helicopter renters might be interested in Scuba diving. Some expatriate Indians living in Africa who Scuba dive might be interested in the ballads. And so on. Therefore he wants the landing website to be:

Welcome to the TTT Company – LANDINGwebsite.com
TIMELY TERRIFIC THRILLS

Helicopter/Mountain Image
Click on: English / German
linked to firstTTTwebsite.com/ or subdomain

Scuba/Beach Image
Click on: French / Swahili
linked to secondTTTwebsite.com/ or subdomain

Ballad/Library Image
Click on: Hindu / Sanskrit
linked to thirdTTTwebsite.com/ or subdomain

Joe TTT entrepreneur wants first time visitors to hit this “landing page” website and be re-directed, as opposed to having one giant multilingual website with lots of navigation. Afterwards his visitors can bookmark on their own the precise website and pages of interest to them.

Looking forward to your comments and appreciate any suggestions.

Regards,
JH
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by mgoodman on 8/22/2011 at 9:49 PM Accepted
    I think the situation you've set up is not likely to work regardless, because your target audiences and the benefits you offer them are just too different to put under a common umbrella. The search engines are smart enough to figure out that the keywords/search terms that fit for one of them don't work for the others.

    So having the umbrella website with the intent of segmenting is a bad strategy ... as is trying to put the same name on all of the disparate businesses. You'll confuse people -- and search engine bots.

    You're better served to treat each business separately and let the common ownership be your little secret. Your customers (and search engines) don't care. There's no benefit for them from the fact that the owner is dabbling in a lot of different businesses. In fact, it could make them wonder if he/she is truly serious about any of them.
  • Posted on 8/23/2011 at 6:53 AM Author
    mgoodman,

    Well, maybe I got carried away with too fancy an imaginary example. Think instead of extending a strong brand name into a completely different product/service line (the bete noire of Al Ries and Jack Trout, I know), as Porsche has done. Regardless, my question is not WHETHER to have a static "landing website," but rather IS IT POSSIBLE to do it without blowing out SEO, and, if possible, HOW?

    Back to my fancy example, the brand and its keyword combinations heavily promote "thrills," always have thrills as part of the helicopter/scuba/reading experience. Can you somehow make clear to the SEO algorithms that the static "thrill" landing website is an integral part of the other three dynamic content-rich websites by using the proper domain/sub-domain linking? Or by doing something else entirely?

    I have seen a couple of such "landing websites" (unfortunately, did not note the names). In one case on a seperate website all to itself were just two links, one for B2B and one for B2C customers. The links brought you to two entirely different websites, not just for the content, but also for the design, layout and navigation.

    In the other case the "landing website" linked you to the (differently designed) websites for businesses on different continents in different languages.

    Regards,
    JH
    P.S. Have noted a number of your thoughtful responses to other questions, such as to Michella about multiple websites, so I am very glad you noticed mine!



  • Posted by mgoodman on 8/23/2011 at 7:30 AM Accepted
    Could I get high ranking for a website about (a) pornography, (b) oceans of the world, and (c) Smurfs by optimizing it for the keyword "blue?"

    Not likely, even if I segmented site visitors immediately to direct them to individual sites for one of those topics.

    Recognizing the old saw about "never say never," I would still bet my money that you have a problem that can't be solved. Even if you had a page that was all about "thrills" -- with lots of copy about the phenomenon of thrills, I doubt that would translate to anything useful for the other sites.

    But then I've been wrong many times before. (That's how you learn.) And, for the record, I think Ries and Trout are still right about this one! It's hard to shake that P&G training. :)
  • Posted by excellira on 8/24/2011 at 10:31 AM Accepted
    As a user, if you were searching specifically for one of the products or services provided by your organization would you prefer to land on a general page that required you to determine first what the page is about, then require further action by finding and drilling into the actual content you want? This has been proven ad nauseam to be ineffective landing page tactics.

    The best approach is to deliver a page that closely matches the user's query. I think the 3 existing separate sites are more likely to do that than the entry page you speak of.

    Further, think of the chances of a thin general site/page outperforming a focused, vertically-aligned site that is optimized (by accident due to nature of content or tactically through SEO)? Probably slim.

    If the site visitors are interested in your other services, my suggestion would be to cross promote them on the sites with ads pointing to the other sites and also via email, newsletters, and other means.
  • Posted on 9/2/2011 at 5:06 AM Author
    I guess my example was not very good, as I received strategy advice ("what to do"), not tactical advice ("how to do") what customers say they want in feedback. The "what" is clear: (a) they want a short "table of contents" landing website, which would be static (same subjects listed), linking to the long dynamic treatment of those subjects. (b) They also say they do not want to navigate a single giant website.

    I suspect the "how" is, in fact, possible. Below is a link to an article about a .net site with seven static pages that outranks -- for the same main keyword phrase -- a competing website with 5,000 mostly dynamic pages!
    https://www.multidox.net/blog/2/messages/64.html

    Eventually we will learn to ask the SEO question properly and pose it again on the various SEO forums. Perhaps it needs to be phrased in terms of "domain/sub-domains, inter-locking links, html versus php pages, 301 versus 302 re-directs and running URLs through the Scrapebox index checker" all of which are Greek to me.

    Thanks for emphasizing "the strategy trap" for me.

    Regards,
    JH
  • Posted by excellira on 9/2/2011 at 10:47 AM Member
    Having separate sites wasn't in question nor was whether they would rank well. I'm a proponent of vertically aligned sites. It just makes sense.

    However, the way the question is phrased leads me to think that one objective is to create another site that would be all encompassing and would direct users to the mini site of interest. This is the part that doesn't seem to add value.

    Another objective seems to be cross promotion. But that can be easily accomplished via the means I recommended in my previous response (pretty tactical).

    Perhaps providing a brief clarification of what your your objectives and issues are will help us to provide the answer you're looking for. We want to help.
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