Got a highly dynamic website? Thousands and thousands of products? Template driven architecture? Less than friendly IT department?
Bridging pages seem like your only option?

Think again.

Here are ten good reasons for an enterprise SEO approach and why bridging pages are fundamentally flawed...not including the fact that they are bridging pages in the first place.

1. You just added an additional stage in the buying cycle and reduced your conversion rate, why wouldn't you just get the users direct to the page on your main website where they can actually purchase the product?
2. If the pages were hidden so that users could go direct, then they were cloaked. Not a good idea if you intend staying in business online very long.
3. With pages sitting on another domain or subdomain, your primary website wont benefit from any link popularity increase.
4. When the domain comes down, your contract finishes, or you realise its a dumb strategy (so I guess that would result in your contract finishing), you've now got an equally complex clean up process on your hands to get rid of the pages.
5. All those backlinks to the now defunct bridging pages are pointing to the wrong locations - yet another complex consolidation exercise.
6. Why after all the time editorially and design wise that we know you have spent to get your website online and keep the brand image perfect, would you suddenly throw it all away and let another firm take complete control of a users experience? Unmanaged SEO's are one easy way to destroy the brand  - we have seen some horrendous examples of this.
7. Bridging pages are difficult to update. Because they are generally manually created (although some are automated) they wont properly reflect rapid content and product changes on the website.
8. Current best practice theory on SEO focuses on individual and not duplicate content. In fact duplicate content can actually damage your main sites listings. The old throw loads of pages at it and see what ranks mentality was fine for first generation search tools, but is ineffective on current algorithms.
9. Bridging page based strategies open up your optimisation techniques to attack by competitors, who may, legitimately, try to get you penalised. Can you afford an outright loss of search engine based business?
10. Implementing bridging pages because of the above issues will lose you ground to your competitors long term.

Basically, a strategy based on bridging pages does not make any sense, whatsoever, given the current search marketplace.  A good optimiser should have the tools and techniques at their disposal to be able to solve any CMS or site level problem, that is our job.

The money shot: The cost/benefit ratio for implementing a decent site level optimisation strategy, including your development teams cost is usually much better than you think. Even though it seems like the more difficult route, its actually the least intensive long term.

What is more the rewards in terms of straight forward positioning are likely to be much higher than those achievable with bridging pages. All this without the risks associated with black hat techniques.

Now that’s got to be good.