Doorway pages - Are they good or bad for SEO?
What are doorway pages are they good or bad? Does your SEO agency use them to increase your rankings, they wont soon!
Google And Doorway Pages
Google has announced this week that they are going to clamp down on Doorway pages.
Should you be concerned?
Yes if your SEO company uses them.
What Is A Doorway Page?
A doorway page is or site has been made to rank highly for specific search queries. These provide a poor UX (user experience) as they do not generally provide users with the information they are looking for and that they can lead to multiple similar pages in user search results, where each result ends up taking the user to essentially the same destination. They can also lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination.
Here Are Some Examples Of Doorways:
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Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page
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Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s)
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Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy
An example:
www.website/seo/townA and then from the same site www.website/seo/townB
Another example:
http://companyabout-us/areas-covered/brighton-hove/
http://www.companyabout-us/areas-covered/air-conditioning-brighton/
You usually find such pages have worked well over the years, one page targeting a local area that has slightly different content on but is not informative as if it was a main page.
Why Are Doorway Pages Bad?
Google generally sees this as a form of cheating, instead of adding quality content and bespoke information to a website on a regular basis; doorway pages are made specifically to cheat Google and get traffic for SEO reasons.
Google has advised against this for a number of years, and yet you still see companies trying to cheat the system but hopefully Google is now going to clamp down on these companies and websites.
Google wants to provide its customers with a quality user experience, providing their searchers using Google with information that they want, that is useful, bespoke and original. How can a doorway site be all of this?
We welcome this decision and its about time Google clamps down on this form of cheating. Google clamped down on buying links, using any old link to a website, then spammy content, Panda and Penguin updates; this will be another major change to Google’s algorithms.
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