Cars.com linking to Dealers website VDP. Is this New???

[Jeff Kershner]

@Jeff Kershner and @Alex Snyder, We currently don't have a Cars dot com package. We pulled out roughly 3 years ago. I was just searching Cars dot com and looking for changes on the site. Thats when I noticed the direct link for the VDP. Then I checked multiple listings and roughly 50 - 60% of the ones I spot checked had a link to the VDP for the vehicle. This was the first I've seen of it and I didn't recall seeing anything posted here in the forums about it.

I'm guessing someone made a mistake. Shhhhhhh.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Realistically guys, how many customers are actually going to click on that little hidden link? Is it worth paying extra money for that? If for some reason a customer really wants to see a car on your own website they are going to find it regardless.

Don't get me wrong if it's free I'm all for it...but I would never pay an extra $500 /mo for that and a couple extra photos. Seems like a money grab by Cars.com, much like they're doing with DealerRater right now.

Agreed. Would never pay for that alone. It was part of a $300 package upgrade for us. Would it make since to have a UTM code placed in the link for better tracking, if there's any really to measure?

 

[Ryan Everson]

Agreed. Would never pay for that alone. It was part of a $300 package upgrade for us. Would it make since to have a UTM code placed in the link for better tracking, if there's any really to measure?

Yeah luckily Cars.com is on their game and has it added already!

?utm_campaign=deeplink&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=cars.com

 

[Alexander Lau]

Realistically guys, how many customers are actually going to click on that little hidden link? Is it worth paying extra money for that? If for some reason a customer really wants to see a car on your own website they are going to find it regardless.

Don't get me wrong if it's free I'm all for it...but I would never pay an extra $500 /mo for that and a couple extra photos. Seems like a money grab by Cars.com, much like they're doing with DealerRater right now.

You're exactly right and the inventory is dynamic, so there isn't a real backlink / SEO value.

 

[Brian Tucker]

From my understanding, they launched this at NADA last year. If you upgrade it runs about $500 depending on your dealerships market area (metro,rural,etc.)
Interestingly enough, I have noticed some stores get more clicks to the dealers site without the vdp deep linking. It seems to be brand specific? The data I'm looking at is a little old. This may have changed in the last several months. I think this should be part of their core product without the upcharge.

 

[Dave Lemmon]

Realistically guys, how many customers are actually going to click on that little hidden link? Is it worth paying extra money for that?

I'd be interested in seeing how many clicks people are seeing. When Craigslist disabled HTML and made their links copy and go only, we expected to see almost no traffic. We were absolutely wrong and for our independent dealers, CL is often their 2nd or 3rd highest web traffic source.

 

[John Colascione]

I think this is a fantastic add-on value for dealers who are concerned with SEO. I believe this should help, even though the dealer VDP page eventually disappears, this should help since it is showing inbound links to deep internal pages of the site. Even if they place a no follow tag on it, I think it is a healthy representation that a website has unique value deep inside its pages. Sure, Google may not value its anchor text (if no followed), which is not optimized anyway, but it is much better than no link at all. If I were building an algorithm, I'd certainly value a site WITH internal deeep links a bit more than one without any. Should they charge for it? probably not.

And as far as Craigslist traffic from copy paste links, I’ve seen decent traffic from that as well. I was very surprised at how many people will actually copy/paste a URL to see more info.