Doorway Page Algorithm To Be Launched By Google

[aakk9999]

Google has announced yesterday that they are launching doorway page algorithm:

An update on doorway pages
16th March 2015
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk]

Over time, we've seen sites try to maximize their “search footprint” without adding clear, unique value. These doorway campaigns manifest themselves as pages on a site, as a number of domains, or a combination thereof. To improve the quality of search results for our users, we’ll soon launch a ranking adjustment to better address these types of pages. Sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change.

[Rasputin]

I don't believe anything will happen simply because if they attempt to test they will effect their whitelist of sites which in that case is something they will not put live.

I wish I shared you optimism. I think they can quite easily introduce an update for the rest of us but exclude the changes from being applied to sites on their whitelist, as I think they did with panda (at least the original version of panda) and almost certainly the 'ads above the fold' penalty was not applied to 'premium' sites.

[toidi]

This will be interesting. I am in rea! es!a!e and my big box competition have no branches, service no areas, have no product, have never been involved in the business and serve up duplicate content, but they show up in the top 3 spots of the serps for every zip code in the us.

these big aggrgators have also killed the ppc market because us little guys don't want to waste money competing against the behemoths, and we have mutiple other, more traditional marketing channels. The local ppc competition used to be very robust when we were competing with each other but brand bias killed it off. The goog shot itself in the foot!

[Shepherd]

I will call this update the "LTK Update", the long tail killer. We knew it was coming, google's last great squeeze to keep revenue growth going.

They killed the high volume commercial keywords with penguin and now comes the natural progression of going after the long tail.

[Nutterum]

+1 to Shepherd

[EditorialGuy]

I will call this update the "LTK Update", the long tail killer. We knew it was coming, google's last great squeeze to keep revenue growth going.

Or maybe they just think their SERPs would be better without doorway pages.

As Freud reputedly said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

[webcentric]

"Ranking adjustment" in my mind simply means more chaos in the SERPS, more factors no one can put a finger on. I'm with Brett on this. I don't have a real doorway problem anyway. Will just watch for what the landscape looks like if and when the dust settles. Chasing dust particles around in Cyberspace is an exhausting exercise.

[guggi2000]

G said to combine pages a long time ago. It could lead to better user experience and better site navigation. I agree with that.

However, one of the problems is that there are no SEO techniques to rank high for multiple keyword sets for one page, in example having multiple (secondary) title tags in one html.

Or am I missing something here?

[Shepherd]

sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

And sometimes business is just business...

[webmasterworld.com...]

[rish3]

G said to combine pages a long time ago. It could lead to better user experience and better site navigation. I agree with that.

However, one of the problems is that there are no SEO techniques to rank high

I tried a few queries for different combinations of "<product attribute> <product name>". Like "Yellow T-Shirt", for example.

There do appear to be some combination pages ranking, but not many. Using the example of "Yellow T-Shirt", 1 of the top 10 is a combo page. And, that listing does not rank well for other colors that the shirt comes in, like "orange".

I tried quite a few other queries, for other types of products, and other types of attributes. The pattern is pretty undeniable. Optimized, separate pages work better.

[RedBar]

Optimized, separate pages work better.

And especially so if stuffed with keywords and other garbage, Google loves them and thinks they're the height of unique quality and will rank them right at the top!

[rish3]

Google also does things themselves that look like doorway pages to me. This is a Google owned and operated website, for example:

www.gybo.com/alabama [gybo.com...]
www.gybo.com/alaska [gybo.com...]
www.gybo.com/arizona [gybo.com...]
www.gybo.com/arkansas [gybo.com...]
etc...

Noticed that Google just completely revamped these pages, including:

Changed the urls from state name to state abbreviation (/arizona to /az)

Added more unique content to each page, making them look less auto generated (they clearly were before, less than 3-8 words different on each page)

I wonder if someone at GYBO is cursing me right now :)

[Robert Charlton]

rish3 - I'm glad you had picked a Google property for your examples.

These would be spam doorway pages in numerous ways, if they were being promoted or in the index, but they're not. They're noindexed and nofollowed. I guess it's fair game if they link to them somewhere.

They appear to be simply feel-good pages on which there's graphics and boilerplate text that's essentially the same for every location. The text appears to be javascript generated.

When I get Arkansas, eg, using your links above, a click on the page to "Take Me To My City" takes me to an IP localized page of my current location in California, in which the only things changing are the city banner and something like a restaurant name. The restaurant names change by themselves. Clicking "See Why It Matters" brings up an anywhere-USA video (trt 1:39). Can't check whether the videos change to accompany the population size, but my guess is that there might be some demographic profiling.

Searches for quoted text on the page,like "Let's help every local business get their info online. Here's how you can help", don't return the pages... though in the serps I'm seeing a couple of pages for a similar page from another location, but the serp query changed to an unquoted query, which means that there's not much on this in the index.

I don't know how you found the urls. It may be that they had neglected to noindex the pages at first, and those urls ended up showing in results. Perhaps they noindexed them when they made the changes that you noted. Hard to guess.

They wouldn't even be useful as organic doorway pages, though it is an interesting demo of doorway pages intended for users (well, sort of... I think they're a snooze) and not intended for search.

[rish3]

These would be spam doorway pages in numerous ways, if they were being promoted or in the index, but they're not. They're noindexed and nofollowed. I guess it's fair game if they link to them somewhere.

That noindex and nofollow are new. They were backlinked, and ranking, before I outed them ;)

Use ahrefs or similar on the old style urls, with the full state name. There was a very active SEO campaign.

[fathom]

This was suggested a month ago... did they launch?

I didn't see any change.

[samwest]

Remember folks, "Do as Google says, not as they do." - meh

[anand84]

I guess all websites that do PPC advertising will have a good number of landing pages that Google will classify as doorway. Now what is the impact going to be - are these pages not going to show up on search any more? This is welcome.

But does this announcement mean Google will weigh down the authority of websites that have large number of what they call "doorway pages"? I hope that is not the case since PPC advertisers are going to get impacted a lot.

[dolcevita]

All states:
[gybo.com...]
[gybo.com...]
[gybo.com...]
[gybo.com...] etc.. are not noindex and nofollow. Just tested with Mozilla. They are also not blocked in robots.txt

All cities:
[gybo.com...]
[gybo.com...] etc... do have as well noindex and nofollow:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

[netmeg]

(Many PPC professionals, including myself, always NOINDEX our landing pages)

[rish3]

All states:
[gybo.com...]
[gybo.com...]
[gybo.com...]
[gybo.com...] etc.. are not noindex and nofollow.

Those are the new, revamped pages. The pages used to have the full state name, like /arkansas. The old pages are now 301'ed to the new ones. The old pages were more obviously "doorway pages", with text that looked like very template driven..."Get your {Arkansas|Alabama} business {on the web|online}". The old pages also had heavily skewed anchor text from inbound links...as if google told the various government web site partners *exactly* what anchor text to use, etc.

[aristotle]

I don't know much about this type of site, but when I looked at it, my first thought was why don't they just have one page for the whole U.S. where you input your zip code or city name.

[rish3]

I don't know much about this type of site, but when I looked at it, my first thought was why don't they just have one page for the whole U.S. where you input your zip code or city name.

My impression is that the pages were originally designed to capture organic traffic. They were almost the textbook description Google now gives for doorway pages.

Since the revamp, they seem to intend to use the pages, along with new city/specific pages, as pages that people are redirected to (from the home page) based on geolocation. And, they seem to be noindexing them...some are missing that, but maybe they are working through it.

Aside from the bit of schadenfreude I'm enjoying watching the scramble, it's interesting because it almost serves as a guide for what a doorway page really *was*, and what Google wants you to do instead.

On the other hand, the ebay /bhp/* pages are now ranking really, really well. I still don't understand why those aren't doorway pages. They are *not* in a normal user's path when browsing ebay, are artificially keyword-stuffed, rich anchor linked, and clearly intended solely to capture organic traffic. Bad enough that Google did slap them with a manual penalty, but then lifted it, though I don't see that eBay changed anything substantial.

[aristotle]

rish3 wrote:
Aside from the bit of schadenfreude I'm enjoying watching the scramble

So most likely Google is waiting until they get this site ( and possibly some of their other sites) revamped before they launch the Doorway Page part of their algorithm. It definitely does look like an amusing situation.

[Johan007]

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System: The following 3 messages were spliced on to this thread from: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3007383.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 1:11 pm on Apr 26, 2015 (PDT -8)

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Google webmaster Blog: [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk...]

Is the purpose to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site, or are they an integral part of your site’s user experience?

I am hoping this will be a simple spam filter but feel I must prepare for possible gray area if you consider categories, tagging, top level navigation sections could form part of the quote above.

One possible factor I am interested in is the percentage of unique articles (not so interested in eCommerce sites) to the rest (tagging categories, top level navigation) and would like to know how they compare to other sites you all own?

So I have 1385 unique content pages and a total of 1590 pages indexed. So I have 206 categories, tagging, top level navigation sections.

Actions I had taken I recommend other do:

For my main pagination I use rel=next so that 117 and 60 of these pages that form my 2 categories will be seen as 2 pages by Google.

For my tags and sub categories I have noindexed pagination.

If there are any other considerations we could implement please do post and if you have a content site please do post how many articles vs how many pages indexed.

[aristotle]

Is the purpose to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site, or are they an integral part of your site’s user experience?

I'm confused. Is "and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site" part of Google's definition of a doorway page. If so, it doesn't make sense to me. If your site has an article about "antique widgets" and the searcher is looking for information about "antique widgets", then he or she would want to go straight to the article. How can Google consider such an article to be a "doorway page"?

[Johan007]

No sure if this helps but I found that Google has a freshened definition for clarity:

[support.google.com...]

Doorways are sites or pages created to rank highly for specific search queries. They are bad for users because 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:

Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page

Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s)

Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy

The last two bullet points are of concern to me. Google does not mention:

Tagging

Categories

Top level sections

IMO Tagging falls into not being "clearly defined, browseable hierarchy"

If your articles are in multiple categories and tags they may also be an issue as they may apear "similar pages that are closer to search"

I expect there could also be some sort of ratio for these types of pages vs real content pages.

I could also be jumping the gun.

[Robert Charlton]

We're still getting questions about whether the doorway algorithm launched, and just for the record, I thought I'd post this to note something that Barry at SER posted almost a month ago... which is that John Mueller had confirmed that the doorway algo "has rolled out"....

Google: The Doorway Algorithm Did Launch
Apr 24, 2015
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-doorway-algorithm-launched-20201.html [seroundtable.com]

Barry mentions that lots of people are still asking on "a ton of forums" whether the algorithm launched, so I'm thinking that it must not have been very noticeable. I've continued to watch those "outrageous" examples of doorways that I mentioned early on in this thread, designed to game the Google local "Pigeon" algorithm, and they are still ranking, so I haven't noticed the rollout either.

Also, Johan007... sorry to take so long getting back to this... in my earlier post in this discussion, I expressed a concern somewhat similar to yours about pages within a site intended to emphasize certain phrases. My concern was much more about the wording about the algo, though, than about how I build sites.

The way this guideline is worded, one might wonder whether legit ecommerce category pages within a site are likely to get hit. There are legit category pages of marginal value currently ranking that I assume might be vulnerable.

You're asking about tag pages, though, and I should say Google has been fairly clear that it doesn't like tag pages if they're simply user-generated with no cap on the number of pages. Tag page plug-ins end up generating a great many mostly empty pages, with no unique content, and these usually are a Panda problem. Some sites use tags very well, though, by not overdoing how many such pages there are. I think you're better off with either category pages that include useful content beyond the links, or else direct links to related pages.