deadsea - 11:00 am on Oct 3, 2012 (gmt 0)

I was surprised by a few of the examples they give.

Under "keyword stuffing" they give the example "Blocks of text listing cities and states a webpage is trying to rank for". Its very common to find local webpages in my area doing this for their service/delivery area. I see it for plumbers, contractors, firewood delivery and such. "We service the following towns: Acton MA, Boxboro MA, Marlboro MA..." I would have thought that a list of 30 towns like this is good for users (can I actually hire this contractor?) and not excessive.

I would not have categorized "Multiple pages on your site with similar content designed to rank for specific queries like city or state names" as "doorway pages" either. Copying your own pages and changing the keywords is more of a "landing page" strategy as long as the pages are useful and don't just funnel you into a single destination. Clearly, local destination pages are OK if the content is different enough, I see pages targeted at city state all the time in the travel industry where the landing page is about the destination and not just copied generic content.

I'd also have to express my displeasure with the "Text translated by an automated tool without human review or curation before publishing" guideline. I would actually recommend doing this as long as you give your users the chance to correct the text themselves. I've found that users are more than willing to correct translations in short order. Google itself translates its content using its users. Giving users a starting point of machine translation is much better than giving them a starting point of English.