Question on doorway pages

[woodpecker]

Hi all, I would like a little advice on doorway pages.

We have a site with a few thousand products, in the past when users have searched using the on-site search we have generated new pages based on these searches, the resulting pages show lists of products which match the search, we would then put links to these result pages in the footer under a heading of recent searches, would these be considered doorway pages or is this ok?

[engine]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, woodpecker.

One person's doorway page is different from anothers.

Some may class that as thin content.

If you have doubts, you could always make them noindex.

[woodpecker]

Thanks for the reply, we had some script created pages that I decided were absolute trash so I've set those to return a 410, I'm just unsure at what point a search results page becomes a doorway page.

Whilst browsing the web today I found one quite large UK company that has over 70000 indexed URLs that have titles that start "You Searched For" or "Search results", whilst some of these pages seemed ok some were absolute trash and were clearly auto generated from a word list, this particular site seems pretty high in the results despite these spammy pages though.

[lucy24]

Consider it from this side: Would any user, anywhere, be happy landing on a page that was any kind of search-results page? They annoy the ### out of me as a user: I've just come from a search engine and don't want another one.

It should be straightforward to add a <noindex> tag globally to all search-results pages. The fact that some sites can't be bothered (it's, what one line of code?) doesn't mean your users are perfectly happy landing on non-pages.