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I saw many doorway pages in both Yahoo and Google in the top of the SERP. Especially, in my niche markets , some are man-made and other are software generated (smart page scheme) is doorway page the way to go in 2004?
The only suggestion I have, you can try looking near the bottom of the pages, or for comments in the source. Most of the time, the free programs will have a "generated by" message.
Most of the time, the free programs will have a "generated by" message.
This is the kind of stupidity that got thousands of sites with WPG-generated doorways banned from AltaVista some years back.
It depends, I supposed, on how much you value your domain.
"if the algo can see all this stuff ..like Google says "
How come it's still there ...
Either google can see this going on ..and doesn't give ****
Or
Google can't see anywhere near as much as they tell us not to do ...and only the faint hearted wear the "white seo hats "....
Becuse all of this "report a spammy /cloaked /whatever site " is ludicrous if they also say the "algo" does all this automatically ...!
kinda like "god is all seeing all knowing all powerfull " ..and then seeing "report a sinner to god " notices pasted up on church doors ....
That's a minimum of 86 million searchs a day. And perhaps 10 times that.
And we see what? 1 spam complaint a day?
That isn't perfection.
But it is close to 6-sigma out-of-this-world quality.
-Brandon
How would an algo know what's in the agreement between the web hosting company and their clients? And how could Google or any search engine possibly get in the middle? The only thing Google can get it on is the fact that they're cloaked and feeding them something different than what the users see. It's still a sticky situation, any way you look at it.
With links back for generated doorway pages, this can be seen now with directories put up. That's not a problem at this point unless the directory site itself turns into a bad neighborhood and all those sites out there are linking to it from every page.
As far as the generated gibberish is concerned, discerning context is still a human function; all that can be deduced about a page with the keywords is other on-page factors and links.
Though there's research done, it's still a far way off from discerning contextual relevancy to really be useful in spotting things automatically.
>>Google can't see anywhere near as much as they tell us not to do
No they can't yet see by algo what the human eye can see. They are not even catching doorway pages on sites that are passing PR that they're being fed with hidden links from elsewhere on the site (including high PR homepages) - and other sites.
You can bet I'm one of the chicken hearted, with good reason. If I can find and track down this type of thing, so can others. Instead of whistle-blowing, some of us use valuable finds like that to help figure out what's working, and why and how.
But others who may find them might not do that. Whiners will use all their energy indulging in self-pity and righteous indignation and turn them in. They're the ones who lose most, for not taking advantage of an opportunity to use one of the best tools out there for figuring out how search engines tick at a given time.
>>is doorway page the way to go in 2004?
Yes and no. In a hurry with throw-away domains it's obvious that it's the way. Not everyone is in the crash and burn crowd though, so it's a qualified yes, somewhere in between yes and no. Doorway gibberish pages is one thing, but developing legitimate content and/or information and/or product pages within guidelines can provide doorways to the site that accomplish the same thing. Not as well or as profitable maybe, but there's an aspect of longevity by being able to pass human scrutiny.
There are two different schools of thought, or a combination - short or long term strategy or both. But the so-called "black hats" are in actuality the best SEOs out there, else their pages wouldn't be ranking as they do.
The choice is between burning them or learning from them.
Free hosts always have a link, not just when googlebot visits and that is the difference. Google says cloaking is not allowed, yet these guys have not been punished. This could also effect their client's PR because they are technically the site cloaking. Any webhost like this has extremely low scruples and google should have detected this a long time ago.
-Brandon
I'm familiar with a hosting company that has their clients putting up links to them - voluntarily, on every page. They're very nice people, well liked because of their outstanding attention and service.
But it's unlikely their clients have any idea that they're giving away so much value by so nicely giving those lovey-dovey links. They're primarily sites in a relatively low-PR type of market, and each link can represent quite a loss on sites like that. So then, what the hosting company can do is take their elevated PR and whoosh it on over to the sites of their own design clients, who may even be competitors of some of the hosted sites. Nice, huh? Taking advantage of people's ignorance by manipulating them isn't too nice in my book, but that isn't violating TOS in any way. It's a personal choice, and we call have to make them.
So let's just assume that links to web hosts look "normal" to a bot and don't trigger any flags for that reason.
But we're not talking about that web host or about cloaking; it's obvious there's a lot of cloaking out there not getting detected. What we're talking about now is whether or not doorway pages are a good way to get rankings nowadays.
When is a doorway page a "dodgy doorway page" and when isn't it? How do we define what's a doorway page, landing page, etc., and what's legit or not, when we can see with our eyes, which bots can't?
When is a doorway page a "dodgy doorway page" and when isn't it? How do we define what's a doorway page, landing page, etc., and what's legit or not, when we can see with our eyes, which bots can't?
Hope I'm not wearing this one out... Every page is a potential doorway page. Assuming no cloaking and no machine generated gibberish, doorway pages are problems only when they're not integrated into the site or when the links back to them are hidden.
Here's a thread that includes my history of the doorway concept... how it became distorted... and why I think that PageRank has made penalties for orphan doorways superfluous (they do themselves in without penalization):
When is a door not a door?
When it's ajar. But seriously - about doorway pages...
[webmasterworld.com...]
relevant-keywords.com/keywords.html
The page contains a short text rich in keywords.
But it doesn't give you the time to read it unless , you click immediatly on the 'stop' button.
The source contains:
window.location="http://irrelevant-site" it is a redirection to a pr0n site , nothing to do with my market.
In Google thing are not better , I see two type of successful doorway page in my niche market.
Top ranked doorway page are usually constructed this way :
keyword in the title page, in the title paragraph, the text is usually longer than in Yahoo and the text is not filled with keywords. You have 6 seconds to read the page , the source contains:
meta http-equiv="refresh" content="6;url=http://www.irrelevant-site". The sad thing is the redirection to an *irrelevant* site.
The second successful doorway page scheme in Google is more subtil, you have to click 'cache' to see the actual doorway or cloaked? page.
It will be a page full of links , keywords are used only 4 times in the file name, title page, title paragraph and in a subtitle <h3>. In my case when I clicked the link in the google SERP I was redirected to a software publisher. My niche market has nothing to do with software.
You see how brain-damaged this bussiness is?
you look for vitamins and you end up on a pr0n site, you look for cars and you end up on an anti-spyware site.
