doorways, subdirectories and page rank

Will doorways in subdirectories receive less PR than in the root?

[KanukBoy]

Hi everyone,

Should I put my doorways (let's say they are not the spammy auto generated ones) in a subdirectory?

Will Google give it a smaller PR for being in a subdirectory instead of in the root directory?

Thanks.

[Nick_W]

I beleive so, yes.

Keep them in the root.

Nick

[caine]

depends how it is link to the rest of the site, also whether they have good incoming links.

[Beachboy]

Kanuk, do bear in mind that Google wants to see incoming links to pages in order to include them in the index. Therefore, each "doorway page" needs to have at least one incoming link from somewhere.

[KanukBoy]

Thanks for your replies.

I plan to include links from my home page like this:

home > doorway index > doorway pages > content/doorway index/home

>depends how it is link to the rest of the site, also whether they have good incoming links

I mean, what if I have the same links pointing to the pages: only their location is different?

[andy04031]

why are you focussing on doorway pages? create content rich pages and you have no headache about doorway - don't waste your energy in doorway, rather invest it in your website! Only my 2 cents

[Marcia]

I don't do doorway pages, I add static pages geared to what searchers are likely to be looking for, particularly if it's a dynamic site.

I've seen that -1 for subdirectories, but not altogether consistently. On one site now that's a PR5 on the high side, I added 3 pages that are in /directories/ that'll be separate sections of the site, like departments.

The pages in the directories ended up PR5, while the pages in the root were 4. The shopping cart is excluded in robots.txt to keep it out of the way, and there are no links from outside the site to any interior pages; just the index page has links in.

Those pages are not linked up the same as the rest of the static pages, which are all in the root. A couple of days ago some root level pages were 4, some 5, and out of those 3 directory pages, one is now 4 and the other two are still 5 - the linking within the site is a little different on one of them.

On a couple of other sites directory and root pages are the same, 1 lower than the index page. On one that's PR4 they're all the same down to /directory/page.html

It's probably different on small sites that only go 1 level deep than it is for large sites. I'm inclined to agree with caine that it depends on the linking in the site.

[fathom]

Hi Marcia, although the reasoning may sound different, you just described a doorway page.

WMW Glossary -- Doorway Page - A page designed as an entrance to a website. Many doorway pages a specifically created to rank high on a particular search engine. Sometimes referred to as a Gateway Page or a Welcome Mat Page.

Although your focus is

geared to what searchers are likely to be looking for

It's unlikely that they will find your "geared page" unless you have intentionally optimized this page and for a specific search engine.

NOTE: Is that a typo - Many doorway pages "a" should be "are".

Just keeping you on your toes! :)