Way to get around cloaking PPC landing pages?

[blacktastic]

Have a deal set up with a merchant where I have to immediately redirect from my url (accessed via search or content network) to theirs. However, this landing page is not going to be optimized for my keywords. My main keyword will be on their landing page, but the "long tail" of the keywords will not.

example - keyword is "dark blue widgets". The landing page I'm redirecting to will be all about widgets, but not "dark blue". This niche has taken a beating recently so the bots may be extra cautious.

One option is for me to cloak my landing page (maybe a javascript redirect?), but that seems risky since it would definitely not pass a handcheck. Too much money flying around to get shut down.

Another option would be to frame their page in mine and have content on my page. Does that work? I usually just do content sites and don't have any ready for this niche.

Any other ideas to get around this for PPC arbi, or will it even matter? I do need to get those minimum bids way down though...

 

[smaxor]

honestly depends on you terms. On highly commercial terms like "mortgage" it really doesn't matter from my experience. However I don't bid on non commerical unrealted terms so I can't speak to that

 

[chrisr]

The IFRAME idea will work, the only challenge is you need to make sure that your IFRAME is big enough to deal with any secondary pages that come through in the order process. I DO NOT set my IFRAMES to 100% width and height - to me that is just to easily checked algorithmically that something is funny with the site. set the height to something like 5000px so that you are assured the IFRAME will have enough room for any potential problems.

Complete a whole order IFRAMED and see that everything works.

Still not sure this will pass a handcheck if the terms are really out of whack. You are essentially trying to Keyword Stuff the content.

Also, you need to clarify the Mercants need for the "redirect". they may not count the iframe as being a redirected customer.

Finally, you consider an Extremley Simple landing page that is highly graphical above the fold with a simple Step 1. Click Here.

Yeah, you dont get as much traffic to the merchant page, but that may not lower the overall conversions as you get people who are actually interested in moving forward

Finally, if the merchant is not doing PPC themselves, just use their URL as the display URL and your aff link as the destination URL. I have done this with certain offers to get a rough sense of how well they convert before spending time bulding out LP. Even with companies that ARE doing PPC and thus outrank me for the display URL, I still generate enough traffic to get a sense of the offers value.

 

[audax]

Wouldn't the iframe make any cookie set by the merchant to be considered third-party? Some browsers won't set third-party cookies.

Am I missing something here? Seems like potential for lost affiliate sales.