Deliberately hunting for scams, dodgy affiliate marketing schemes and off-brand medication isn't what it once was. Where once your search results would fill with a plethora of 'make money fast' pages, you now get high quality blost posts and tutorials on engaging in affiliate marketing. No longer do we suffer through endless adds for generic viagra, instead we have links to scholarly articles.

In fact researching this post, it's become clear that the traditional squeeze page is a death sentence for SEO.

Here's why:

1) Users don't trust them

It's like banner blindness, where users no longer even glance at display advertising; users have, for the most part been trained to perceive this type of page as a scam. The immediate backpedalling creates an exceptionally high bounce rate, which negatively impacts your SEO.

2) Google doesn't trust them

Google's great at sniffing out bad actors and regularly adjusts its algorithm to compensate. That it's next to impossible to find this type of page in organic search is fairly strong proof that they're deliberately targetted for penalties. 

3) Google REALLY doesn't trust them

That these types of pages have become vanishingly rare in the AdWords results is even stronger proof - Google clearly regards the trust gained by not running these ads as more important than the money they could make from them.

4) When Google doesn't trust one page on your site, the rest suffer

Heaven help you if one of these pages is on your main domain - Google sure won't. While PageRank is based on a per-page basis (which is why you see links directly to content pages in search results, rather than just the home page), Google assigns an overal domain authority and domain trust - if there's one page on your domain that's creating a bad impression, then it's dragging your entire site down.

5) The content isn't kingly

If content is king, then the squeeze page is the court jester. Squeeze pages generally contain poor quality content designed for the lowest common denominator. Typically the content is static and doesn't benefit from regular updates.

It's remarkable just how harshly this type of page has been penalised. While you still run across them from time to time (usually linked to from Facebook) I was unable to find any examples in organic search while looking for the types of products and services that have typically been associated with these pages in the past.

In fact, I think it's pretty clear that if you run this type of squeeze page on your primary domain you're asking to be de-indexed by Google.