Melanie Gorman explains why your sales page should live on your own domain, not behind a login. Google can't crawl password-protected pages, so hosting on platforms like Thinkific won't boost your site's authority. Keep anything that affects SEO publicly accessible on your domain.
Okay, so let's say you build your sales page on your own domain, but then you host your course on Thinkific or another subdomain property. Is this going to help your SEO? The answer is yes, and here's why. When you are selling your content, you're driving all the traffic to your sales page, and if that sales page is on MelanieGorman.com in this example, then all the traffic you send there is supporting that domain. Here's the other point. I go through the process to buy this course. I read the landing page, I click the buy button, I'm redirected to Thinkific, right? And now I complete the sale and I'm in Thinkific. That doesn't really have any impact on you because to get into Thinkific, I need a username and password. Anything behind a username and password has no impact or value on your SEO because Google can't see it, right? So if you want anything to impact your SEO, it must be on your own domain and not behind a username and password.
