Are Hotel Vanity Websites considered a Doorway Page to brand.com?

[JohnJimenez]

I work for a large 3rd party management company and we use vanity websites to help us market our hotels. They provide us the ability to better manage our content as well as provide value to our customers versus the brand site. An example would be Vanity: http://www.hiltonmonterey.com/Brand.com: http://hiltongardeninn3.hilton.com/en/hotels/california/hilton-garden-inn-monterey-MRYMHGI/index.htmlBased on my reading of Google's guidelines I am concerned that our vanity site may be interpreted as such. Please advise if this is the case.

[DirkC]

Hi John

Nobody but Google can tell you for sure - but if I compare both pages & check the guidelines here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html the site doesn't look like a typical doorway page:

1.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?
=> the user experience on the vanity url is better than the standard page on the Hilton side. The only moment when you lead your visitors to the main site is when they want to book

2.Are the pages intended to rank on generic terms yet the content presented on the page is very specific? You're site seems optimised for people searching for this specific hotel - not hotels in general or any other generic terms

3. Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic?
You don't exactly duplicate - you enrich the content in order to offer your visitors (and not the search engines) a better experience.

4. Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic and sending users along without creating unique value in content or functionality?
This point is definitely not the case

5. Do these pages exist as an “island?” Are they difficult or impossible to navigate to from other parts of your site? Are links to such pages from other pages within the site or network of sites created just for search engines?
Yes it is an island - but in that case you could see any hotel site as doorway page for a site like Booking.com when they use the Booking search engine.

To be honest, I would not be too worried. The goal of this update to eliminate pages will low added value, that only exist to rank & to funnel visitors to the main site. The example you gave has a high added value, and you're not funnelling to the main site (apart for booking purposes).

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[AlanBleiweiss]

If a "vanity" web site is high quality, offers unique content, and that content is relevant to the specific search queries most accurate to the content provided on that site, it's a perfectly valid site.

If a multi-site environment was designed to have one company/business dominate search results for individual search phrases and if any of those sites created for that purpose are not unique enough but artificially designed to trick ranking domination, that's going to be a problem.

So that's the question - how high is the quality? how unique is the content? How helpful is the "vanity" site?