Massive site-wide internal footer links to doorway pages: how bad is this?
-
My company has stuffed several hundred links into the footer of every page. Well, technically not the footer, as they're right at the end of the body tag, but basically the same thing.
They are formatted as follows:
[" href="http://example.com/springfield_oh_real_estate.htm">" target="_blank">http://example.com/springfield_pa_real_estate.htm">](</span><a class= "http://example.com/springfield_oh_real_estate.htm")springfield, pa real estate
These direct to individual pages that contain the same few images and variations the following text that just replace the town and state:
_Springfield, PA Real Estate - Springfield County
[images]
This page features links to help you Find Listings and Homes for sale in the Springfield area MLS, Springfield Real Estate Agents, and Springfield home values. Our free real estate services feature all Springfield and Springfield suburban areas.
We also have information on Springfield home selling, Springfield home buying, financing and mortgages, insurance and other realty services for anyone looking to sell a home or buy a home in Springfield.
And if you are relocating to Springfield or want Springfield relocation information we can help with our Relocation Network._
The bolded text links to our internal site pages for buying, selling, relocation, etc.
Like I said, this is repeated several hundred times, on every single page on our site.
In our XML sitemap file, there are links to:
http://www.example.com/Real_Estate/City/Springfield/
http://www.example.com/Real_Estate/City/Springfield/Homes/
http://www.example.com/Real_Estate/City/Springfield/Townhomes/That direct to separate pages with a Google map result for properties for sale in Springfield.
It's accompanied by the a boilerplate version of this:
_Find Springfield Pennsylvania Real Estate for sale on www.example.com - your complete source for all Springfield Pennsylvania real estate. Using www.example.com, you can search the entire local Multiple Listing Service (MLS) for up to date Springfield Pennsylvania real estate for sale that may not be available elsewhere.
This includes every Springfield Pennsylvania property that's currently for sale and listed on our local MLS. Example Company is a fully licensed Springfield Pennsylvania real estate provider._
Google Webmaster Tools is reporting that some of these pages have over 30,000 internal links on our site. However, GWT isn't reporting any manual actions that need to be addressed.
How blatantly abusive and spammy is this? At best, Google doesn't care a spit about it , but worst case is this is actively harming our SERP rankings.
What's the best way to go about dealing with this? The site did have Analytics running, but the company lost the account information years ago, otherwise I'd check the numbers to see if we were ever hit by Panda/Penguin. I just got a new Analytics account implemented 2 weeks ago. Of course it's still using deprecated object values so I don't even know how accurate it is. Thanks everyone!
-
So every page has several hundred links to spammy duplicate pages? This is a bad thing.
First off, link equity leaving every page on your site would be split between all these several hundred links whether your NoFollow them or not.
Second, the fact that they are essentially duplicate of each other and there are potentially hundreds of these pages means that your site is likely hurting from thin content penalties.
Third, that image makes it look like old school 90s keyword stuffing. Which is just all sorts of wrong.
My assessment is that Yes... this is hurting your site.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Advise / Help on Bad Link Removals
Hey everyone.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheITOteam
Im new to the community and new to backlinks - hence the question to the community today.
I would like help understanding options and work load around back links and removing them.
I have a client with over 8000 back links as a few years ago he paid someone about £10 to boost his rankings by adding thousands of backlinks.
We fear this is having a bad effect on their site and rankings organically as 90% of these back links have a spam score of over 50% and also no follows. My questions to the community (if you could be so kind to share) are:
1. Whats the best way to decide if a Backlink is worth keeping or removing
2. Is there a tool to decide this or assist with this somewhere on the internet? Ive had advise stating if its not hurting the page we should keep it. However, again...
How do I know what damage each Backlink is causing to the domain? I appriciate anyones time to offer some advice to a novice looking to clear these1 -
Competitor has same site with multiple languages
Hey Moz, I am working with a dating review website and we have noticed one of our competitors is basically making duplicated of their site with .com, .de, .co.uk, etc. My first thought is this is basically a way to game the system but I could be wrong. They are tapping into googles geo results by including major cities in each state, i.e. "dating in texas" "dating in atlanta" however the content itself doesn't really change. I can't figure out exactly why they are ranking so much higher. For example using some other SEO tools they have a traffic estimate of $500,000 monthly, where as we are sitting around $2000. So, either the traffic estimates are grossly misrepresenting traffic volume, OR they really are crushing it. TLDR: Is geo locating/translating sites a valid way to create backlinks? It's seems a lot like a PBN.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Why should I reach out to webmasters before disavowing links?
Almost all the blogs, and Google themselves, tell us to reach out to webmasters and request the offending links be removed before using Google's Disavow tool. None of the blogs, nor Google, suggest why you "must" do this, it's time consuming and many webmasters don't care and don't act. Why is this a "required" thing to do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RealSelf0 -
How do I know for sure if my site has been slapped?
I'm new to this SEO business - and I focus on inbound marketing. My client's site is www.SubconsciousMind.com. Just a few weeks ago it was showing in the top search results for several major keywords. Now, it has disappeared all together and there are competitors showing that have very little SEO (metatarsi not set up properly, etc.). So, I know there has to be an opportunity. Some obvious things:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SoundsLikeJoy
There aren't a lot of links and the majority seem to be bad (bad linking farms)
Social media is set up by a robot
Articles are poorly written obviously ONLY for SEO My client hired a SEO company awhile back to get results, not understanding black hat / white hat and it worked for several years. Now - it is really hurting her. The sites she is linking to doesn't have any contact info to get the "unlinked." I've read I can use the disavow tool. I asked her if she got anything from Google about "being slapped". She doesn't even receive the emails to her site because she trusted someone else to set it all up. Should I rebuild from scratch? Any recommendations? We are funning adwords now as a quick fix.0 -
Merging Sites - consolidation of your my web sites
I have had 3 tourism web sites for many years (each site represents a different place in Costa Rica) and they cross link with each other. www.monteverdetours.com is the main site - the most important one. In order to help ranking and to comply with all the new google changes.... I have recently been advised that (page by page, I should incorporate the other site, www, arenalvolcanotours.com into the monteverde site with 301s, In other words there will be a new directory on monteverde called /arenal-volcano-tours which will be the new home page for the arenal section. So page by page I can map the old URL's to the new URL's eg arenalvolcanotours.com/arenal-hotels-economy.html
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Llanero
301 redirect to
monteverdetours.com/arenal-volcano-tours/arenal-hotels-economy.html Now my monteverde site was once penalized by google and I am worried that doing this might have an adverse effect (although the thinking behind doing this change is because google prefers it to all the cross linking and also I will be able to consolidate all the links from Arenal into Monteverde). I respect the person who made the suggestion but I was interested in opinions from other people! I want to be positive this is a good ideas before undertaking this major work! Any opinions would be appreciated!0 -
Noindexing Thin Content Pages: Good or Bad?
If you have massive pages with super thin content (such as pagination pages) and you noindex them, once they are removed from googles index (and if these pages aren't viewable to the user and/or don't get any traffic) is it smart to completely remove them (404?) or is there any valid reason that they should be kept? If you noindex them, should you keep all URLs in the sitemap so that google will recrawl and notice the noindex tag? If you noindex them, and then remove the sitemap, can Google still recrawl and recognize the noindex tag on their own?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Being Link Attacked - Should I worry?
Hey, Hope everyone is well. Just a quick question. I hope to get an answer from Google officially (I've asked in their webmaster forums area) but any experience or opinions from the community here would be great. I noticed recently that our site started to get thousands of links from comments in random blogs from all across the web. This is nothing to do with us as we don't "build links". I can only assume it is a competitor trying to get our site hit by the algorithm for a particular search term, as all the anchor text (I estimate about 1,800 links with this anchor text) point to one page on our site that is ranking for that term. I recently removed the website from webmaster tools and re added, due to an unrelated issue about the a video rich snippet not updating, and all the links have just popped up today on there. Is this something I need to worry about? and should I start collecting all these domains and using the disavow tool to block the whole domain of these sites with the comments (some of them seem like genuine sites). There seem to be new ones everyday and it looks to be an ongoing attack as well. Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JonathanRolande0 -
Is this a Doorway problem?
Hi, You have a site with good content that you don't want it anymore, so you redirect it to another domain you have. Is it a blackhat tactic such as Doorway page? Is this bad for SEO? What is the best solution? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HildebrandoTrannin0