I'm reviewing a client's ecommerce site and see that they have a good number of what I believe to be doorway pages.
The pages consist of the site's branded wrapper with navigation to shop. The body copy is rather SPAM-like. What's worse is the only way to access these pages is through their sitemap.
In essence, it feels as if they didn't want to take the time to reorganize their pages properly and instead just created a bunch of new pages.
A snippet from Wikipedia best describes the page.
More sophisticated doorway pages, called Content Rich Doorways, are designed to gain high placement in search results without using redirection. They incorporate at least a minimum amount of design and navigation similar to the rest of the site to provide a more human-friendly and natural appearance. Visitors are offered standard links as calls to action.
I want to suggest that client stop using these pages, but with them ranking, it's a difficult argument to make.
My question is, do you think what I'm describing is a doorway page? If so, doorway pages are penalized if I'm not mistaken?
Hard to post when you're not including a link to the page. PM me for an actual link if you'd be kind enough to look at the page in question to see what I'm talking about.
