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I have a site that sells widgets in a competitive market and has a PR5. After doing some indepth key word research I've found that most people find our site using a three word phrase. Our products are searched for on a geographic basis so one of the keywords is always a 'place'. (my point here is that we have a very wide geographic distribution of products - and therefore the potential to have many doorway pages)
Each of my doorway pages are optimised for each key phrase (page title, meta, alt text, key word phrases etc etc). The doorway pages also use different page templates, body text combinations and images so only 1 in every 256 pages contains the same body text, image and page template combination - although different key words are contained in the body text. I haven't used any redirects and all pages are designed to be read (and make sense!) to my visitors.
Currently my key word catalogue would produce over 10,000 pages. My questions are - How many doorway pages are too many? - and - What penalties could come of having so many doorway pages?
Thanks :)
The thing about doorway pages is that Google says they are a punishable offence (doesn't give details, just says doorway pages are bad).
However as you will see here, there are doorway pages and doorway pages, and by giving information for the user it sounds like you have the good kind.
But you should be careful. If even 2 of your 300 (or whatever) pages are too alike you could be in for some nasty penalties (loss of page rank, or even a ban from Google). It's not (as far as I know) about quantity though, but about (in Google's words) "whether you would be comfortable about explaining what you are doing to a competitor".
So, instead of another 57 doorway pages for different places, why not have a whole new section called "where to find us" which then links to pages about each place where you have a shop / distribution base / good delivery rates. You wouldn't even need to put your keyword on these pages as Google and the other modern search engines should be clever enough to work out what the site is about.
But I'd very much like to hear other people's views on this too
So my assumption would be that "1" doorway is too many.
But you do have an alternative. I think that you could build pages that are part of your current domain (www.yourdomain.keyword_xyz.html) and make them valuable content for your users. If you do this and optimize them they will get very good rankings. I have done this with good results. The key here is to build pages with content that is valuable to your customers.
cheers
Hagen
