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Ok - so I decide to make a sitemap at the root level of my Funky Widgets site to make sure the bots find and spider every page. Keep it simple - plain text and links. No problem with that, right? It's been accepted practice for years - and I'm a nice guy for helping the spider (and users) out.
Google's Webmaster Guidelines"Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site."
But then I think "Wait a minute - every page on my site links to this sitemap, and it's getting a stack of PR, and it's just going to waste?"
So I title the page "Funky Widgets Site Map", put "Funky Widgets" in the metas, in body text, H1 tags etc etc.
Lo and behold - I'm number 1 in the SERPS for "Funky Widgets"
THEN I realise there are about 150 links on this "sitemap" page so I should split them up into sections:
Google's Webmaster Guidelines"If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages."
So I do.
"Funky Blue Widgets Site Map", "Funky Red Widgets Site Map", "Funky Yellow Widgets Site Map".
And I'm ranking well for every one of them.
So my question: When do sitemaps become doorway pages? Simply because they've been optimised for a search term? Redirect or cloak? Or does relevance determine it?
When do sitemaps become doorway pages?
Nothing wrong with them from what I can tell. The problem is with the general vagueness of the term "doorway pages" that's come about over the years, and the checkered history of how these pages have been used.
Sitemaps apart... the original idea of a doorway page was a well-focussed optimized page that linked into a site and attracted search.
I'm not clear whether, with the early doorways, the site didn't link back to the doorways, but ultimately that's where the idea was taken... so someone browsing your site couldn't accidentally navigate to such a page if it didn't fit well into the overall scheme of the site.
Questions then came up about how many doorways a specific search engine might allow. This was pre Google and pre PageRank, but there may have already been some linking considerations in operation that we were unaware of.
Variations on doorways came to include machine-generated pages seeded with keywords, and eventually cloaked doorways. Eventually, some years back, AltaVista came down hard on WebPosition Gold generated doorways, causing all sorts of turmoil, and throwing the name "doorway" page into general disrepute.
Then along came Google with PageRank. Even when they're not cloaked and not machine generated, the one-way pages don't do well on Google. Such one-way pages have been called "orphan" pages, and some commentators believe that these orphans are penalized by Google simply because they're perceived as doorways.
I think that orphan pages don't do well because they don't have any PageRank, something which the algo probably anticipated. Efforts to get PageRank to these pages came to include hidden links, and, when hidden links became widespread, Google began to penalize for them.
I've always considered any page on a site to be a potential doorway page, in the sense that it's designed to attract traffic. Over the years there was a perception that the better integrated into the site the doorway was, the less likely it was to cause trouble and the better it did.
As you've observed, a page that's well integrated into the rest of the site gets good PageRank from the site. Such pages are great candidates for optimization, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
Site maps are excellent candidates for optimization anyway... I like to keep enough text between each link that they feel like a mini-directory. An ODP page, or a Yahoo page without the ads, is a good model.
Thanks - great answer. Lack of integration with the rest of site and one-way links = doorway.
It pays to be sure. It can be a fine line and Google can slap you hard if you cross it.
Google Information for WebmastersIf an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or cloaking, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index.
They should probably give definitions of these ban-worthy practices.
Lack of integration with the rest of site and one-way links = doorway.It pays to be sure. It can be a fine line and Google can slap you hard if you cross it.
I don't think Google slaps you hard for lack of integration and one-way links... that's the "orphan page" syndrome, which I feel takes care of itself, because of the low PR of the orphan pages.
What Google's talking about in their Information for Webmasters, I would guess, are a lot of such doorways, possibly machine generated, and/or for cloaked pages. If the one-way doorways get their PR from some sort of external network, that becomes a whole other thing.
I believe these are the key terms. As your site is clearly about funky widgets, what you do is essentially to make it easier for the funky widget audience to reach your individual pages and you even divide the map by topic - that's usability and it works for the spiders too.
Otoh, if you really just wanted to sell some heavy gadgets, it would be misleading to have that great focus on funky widgets. Perhaps not deceptive as different products/topics can be related, but you would do better if you focused on the funky widgets and had a clear division between those otherwise unrelated items i believe. Extreme example: A site that focuses on horsebreeding in all important headlines, links, and titles but is clearly about hi-fi when it comes to content - not much in common apart from the first letter, so where's my reason (as a user) to go there? It's just like putting "sex" a few times in every paragraph on a site about sailing.
Robert_Charlton has some very good points. "If it's integrated in the site" is one - now, if it is so, then it's part of the site and it's hopefully also on topic for that site. I don't want to enter the "themes" discussion with this, but spiders (and people as well) tend to favour sites that have a clear purpose and focus, afaik. SEO is in many ways a design decision as well as a marketing one, and nobody opposes to well-thought-out pages where the precise information you are looking for is easy to find.
/claus
Google needs pages to crawl to help it build the index size and keep it ahead of ATW....we are doing it a service by supplying such pages ;)
If the one-way doorways get their PR from some sort of external network, that becomes a whole other thing.
I'll admit to making "doorway" pages in the past for a site that was totally unspiderable - frames, dynamic content (the dreaded "&id=whatever"), the same stupid title tag on every page. It LOOKED great though.
The thing is, this was a great site with good content.
The doorways should have been orphaned, but I arranged for external links straight to them, so it's not hard to avoid the orphan syndrome.
The doorways then had links to pages that were relevant to the doorway.
Now, this was/is pretty much the definition of doorways, but I don't lose any sleep over it. They ultimately take users to the content they were looking for.
Could probably get the site kicked though.
percentages - lol
I suspect that's why Google got of it's butt and started to index new sites again. I launched a site 5 days ago and it's fully indexed and ranking well already - with no listed backlinks or PR. Go figure!
I have numerous doorway pages on my site. All of my doorway pages point to specific subsections of my site and each doorway has extremely descriptive text.
My doorway pages can be found by a curious user who clicks everything and goes through the entire sitemap, but they're not designed specifically for users. They're designed for search engines and if a user finds it on a search, it serves as a better and more focused front page than any other page of my site, and the doorway links them directly to what they were searching for.
These pages get about 10 times more search-engine traffic than the content pages they're linking to. They're sort of like alternate index pages.
Any opinions on if this is a problem? Should all the content be on there? The way it functions now is that all the product data is on there, and then you click to the dynamic site to purchase, as when a site sends you to a third party shopping cart site.
Whoever wrote that a more clear definition of doorway pages should be published by Google is right. Until they can spider (not index, but spider) dynamic content, I think they owe us dynamic webmasters out there a fair shot at getting our content into their index without penalties, as long as we're following the rules. But how do you play the game when the rules are secrets?
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One other question: the static pages are machine generated in the sense that they are created by the dynamic code, they just are made as html pages with keywords in the URL, so instead of:
www.widgets.com/default.asp?id=9
you get:
www.widgets.com/static/blue_widget.htm
If some people are right that it helps to have keywords still in the URL, then I'm in good shape.
But if you view the source of the page, the code for the whole page is all on one line for the static pages. I just haven't taken the time to break it up. Do you think this is very important?
I mean, the only reason these pages would get turned in is if someone reported them, thinking they're the "bad" kind of doorway page. Then a Google editor would look at the pages, and then, I guess, view the source and think that the pages are just more machine generated spam.
Bek.
Google can do dynamic content OK, it just doesn't like anything with "id=" or more than a couple of variables.
Just do a rewrite so it sees plain URLs
[webmasterworld.com...]
I convinced the site I mentioned earlier to do this and now there's miles of smiles.
Shame to double up on all your content - defeats the purpose of a dynamic site and negates all of the inherent advantages.
You're right that it's a shame to double up on the content since Google can't swing the ampersand, but until they catch up (or buy AllTheWeb's secret formula), this was is easier, and, one would hope, not seen as illegal.
Google will catch up eventually and this will be something we all look back on and laugh about, but until then....
