What's the SEO impact of using Marketo landing pages for paid search?

[Anonymous]

This is a topic of some discussion for us at the moment - there are huge operational benefits to using Marketo landing pages for our paid search landing pages. And I know we can control whether we want those pages crawled by Google. The question is, what impact does this have on our overall SEO - if we have highly ranked landing pages hosted on our Marketo subdomain, does any of the benefit of that accrue to our main site? Or does the use of the subdomain keep that from happening. 

Any  thoughts and experiences to share appreciated. Thanks. 

[Anonymous]

There is no clear answer here. Back in '07, Matt Cutts said that Google does not penalize subdomains or treat them as different sites: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

If your pages are of high value, they will rank for that, but I don't think it does much bad or good for your root site. Just focus on creating great pages and the rest will follow 🙂