&^%$&*(#$ Doorways!

Subject Says It All

[austtr]

I'm looking for comments from experienced doorway exponents.

A very impatient customer (has to be rich by no later than next week... and Monday preferably) will not wait for a site to achieve its correct ranking via the usual SEO methods.

Another SEO exponent convinces the owner that doorways will boost his traffic and hey presto, we get:

www.goldcoast.swsites.net/gold-coast-golf-holidays.html

Rather than get into a probably sterile my-opinion vs your-opinion argument with the doorway guy, it would be good to have some comments on hand from independent experts.

Anyone care to offer a one liner opinion on this doorway? I personally think it is a shocker... probably the crudest bit of attempted spamming I personally have ever seen and possibly putting the original site at risk.

Am I over-reacting?

[oilman]

I'd be far more concerned with:
www.goldcoast.swsites.net/gold-coast-holidays-h.html and the other ones (if you walk back on the url you get a directory listing since they have no index page). Those are the dangerous doorways. Granted it's a javascript redirect but you can't be too safe these days.

The page you listed doesn't appear to be too bad. I'd ditch the banner ads but at least is looks like part of the an actual site.

[georged]

Exactly as Oilman said. Sorry, I think you are over-reacting, but again, that e.g. that Oilman gave would make me pause for thought.

[skirril]

Ok, lemme be agressive

a) [goldcoast.swsites.net(...] should give you a html page, not a directory listing. that's server config (probably naming a site index.html will solve the problem for apache)

b) Use the whole width of the screen (ie. tables, with percent values rather than frames).

c) drop the advertising. It looks bad, and irritating (esp. the rotating banners).

d) The idea of the <br> tag is to get a line break at the end of a paragraph, not at the end of the line. Leave the actual formatting up to the browser.

e) move those font size/face info to a stylesheet

[Gold_Coast]

Can't believe some of the replies in here!
Have a look at the page in question - if it's so bad then why is it ranked so highly in the major engines?
Let me know please as I can't figure out the big fuss. The page is perfectly within all of the search engines acceptance criteria, with all of the main text in the <noframes> area. All it's doing is opening the correct page to the users. The goldcoast.swsites site is a "free host" so the banners are automatically presented. Should people look before comments are passed in this forum?

[startup]

"if it's so bad then why is it ranked so highly in the major engines?"

I checked Google, Fast and Ink. The page is not listed in any of these SEs. Which "major engines" are you referring to?

[NFFC]

Just a quick "lets keep things civil" type post, please.

[Gold_Coast]

Thank's for your input guys!

Well it was in Google :)

Anyway, it's still number one in NorthernLight :)

But the point is, I still don't consider it in ANY WAY spam like the first posting suggested do you ?

[startup]

What got me interested was that is was a free site. The first place I checked was Google. Has anyone noticed that free sites sometimes show up very high in Google? It is almost like the link pop is spread across all the sites(free).

Gold Coast, I viewed the page source and found it to be interesting, so I checked the SEs. The page is not SPAM.

[Gold_Coast]

:)

I use quite a few free hosts to run pages from. The only reason that I'm a bit sceptical in using free hosts now is because some have closed down, and then you lose your rankings with silly 404 pages.

Anyway, thanks for the comments on the page, as I have been subjected to comments in my home town by this "austr" gentleman for a while. Maybe one day he'll realise that he's not always right.

Have a great easter.

[miles]

"lets keep things civil"

WmW is not a personal battle ground. Oilman said it best keep it civial. Please leave personal problems away from the forum, this is not a contest to see who can be right or wrong.