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Google has recently stated that websites that use doorway pages as a method of increasing their \u201csearch footprint\u201d without adding clear, unique value\u201d may soon be penalised. We\u2019ve all seen them; these are the pages that you often see on a website or a number of domains that are used to help rank the website for a specific search phrase that may not be regularly used across the rest of the website and will regularly not be part of the standard navigational user experience.<\/p>\n
Regularly used in the retail and B2B sector, especially with brands with an offline presence ran on a franchise model or with a centralised marketing budget; you\u2019ll see these types of businesses being hit. They typically have local stores, concessions and outlets pages that will often be left presenting themselves with a close to identical content with a local map listing and a \u2018unique\u2019 heading tag and page title. I believe that these types of pages will be hit.<\/p>\n
The digital marketing industry has been using doorway pages since before the start of this century. We\u2019ve seen them used them for a number of reasons, not just for spam reasons; there has regularly been a lack of willingness to invest in local search in the retail sector, normally due to a lack of investment or understanding at board room level. Regardless of the reasons or excuses of why brand managers let this happen, it\u2019s fair to say they doorway pages are used to create a larger search footprint without necessarily providing anything unique to the user experience.<\/p>\n
Some of examples that Google cite are:<\/p>\n
Regularly used by the affiliate industry for organic positioning or to provide the correct content or code for bots, search engines, agents or browsers; doorway pages have been seen as a way of getting pages indexed and ranked fairly quickly to drive traffic without too much effort. Unfortunately the knock on effects of this latest Google update may be as drastic as getting your web pages penalised on Google or your brand, trust and reputation being tarnished in front of your potential audience. Neither of them are ideal scenarios that you want to be left to deal with. As always, the economics of reputation far outweigh the benefit of using outdated black hat SEO techniques.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s the difference between a doorway page and a landing page?<\/p>\n \n Get exclusive insights into digital \n \n \n Stay Forward <\/h2>\n
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