My attempt to reduce duplicate content got me slapped with a doorway page penalty. Halp!

[CoreyTisdale]

On Friday, 4/29, we noticed that we suddenly lost all rankings for all of our keywords, including searches like "bbq guys". This indicated to us that we are being penalized for something. We immediately went through the list of things that changed, and the most obvious is that we were migrating domains.

On Thursday, we turned off one of our older sites, http://www.thegrillstoreandmore.com/, and 301 redirected each page on it to the same page on bbqguys.com. Our intent was to eliminate duplicate content issues.

When we realized that something bad was happening, we immediately turned off the redirects and put thegrillstoreandmore.com back online. This did not unpenalize bbqguys.

We've been looking for things for two days, and have not been able to find what we did wrong, at least not until tonight.

I just logged back in to webmaster tools to do some more digging, and I saw that I had a new message. "Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected doorway pages on http://www.bbqguys.com/"

It is my understanding that doorway pages are pages jammed with keywords and links and devoid of any real content. We don't do those pages. The message does link me to Google's definition of doorway pages, but it does not give me a list of pages on my site that it does not like. If I could even see one or two pages, I could probably figure out what I am doing wrong.

I find this most shocking since we go out of our way to try not to do anything spammy or sneaky. Since we try hard not to do anything that is even grey hat, I have no idea what could possibly have triggered this message and the penalty.

Does anyone know how to go about figuring out what pages specifically are causing the problem so I can change them or take them down?

We are slowly canonical-izing urls and changing the way different parts of the sites build links to make them all the same, and I am aware that these things need work. We were in the process of discontinuing some sites and 301 redirecting pages to a more centralized location to try to stop duplicate content.

The day after we instituted the 301 redirects, the site we were redirecting all of the traffic to (the main site) got blacklisted. Because of this, we immediately took down the 301 redirects.

Since the webmaster tools notifications are different (ie: too many urls is a notice level message and doorway pages is a separate alert level message), and the too many urls has been triggering for a while now, I am guessing that the doorway pages problem has nothing to do with url structure. According to the help files, doorway pages is a content problem with a specific page.  The architecture suggestions are helpful and they reassure us they we should be working on them, but they don't help me solve my immediate problem.

I would really be thankful for any help we could get identifying the pages that Google thinks are  "doorway pages", since this is what I am getting immediately and severely penalized for. I want to stop doing whatever it is I am doing wrong, I just don't know what it is! Thanks for any help identifying the problem!

It feels like we got penalized for trying to do what we think Google wants. If we could figure out what a "doorway page" is, and how our 301 redirects triggered Googlebot into saying we have them, we could more appropriately reduce duplicate content.

As it stands now, we are not sure what we did wrong. We know we have duplicate content issues, but we also thought we were following webmaster guidelines on how to reduce the problem and we got nailed almost immediately when we instituted the 301 redirects.

[CoreyTisdale]

The domains in question were all previously owned by me in my webmaster tools account long before this happened. I've since gone and put in an address change request for the site that has the 301s on it to point to the new site.

I'm feeling like I got stuck with a false positive here, but it is taking forever to get re-reviewed. Of course, it is grilling season now, so I'm losing tens of thousands of dollars in revenue per day that we are out of the index.

I realize the answer is probably no, but does anyone have any tips on how to speed up the review process? I could lose a quarter million dollars over the course of a week or two.

[DanDeceuster]

A doorway page is an old school black hat SEO technique. What webmasters would do is buy domains with high PR or buy expired domains that used to be competitors and then 301 redirect them back to their website. This was in essence buying their links, as the links to the old domains now ended up at their domain.

Are your domains all on the same hosting account or same serer c-block? Are they all registered and verified with Google Webmaster Tools? If not, then Google may seem them as being owned by different people. In that case, it would look to them like you just bought a bunch of domains and redirected them all to your domain.

To you, you were simply finding all the duplicate content out there and consolidating it into one domain the way you think you should. It just didn't look that way to Google. I would recommend claiming and verifying every one of the domains you want to 301 in GWT. Once you have them verified, then redirect them all to your new domain. At that point, file a reconsideration request with Google, explain your situation, show how you have all the domains verified and that they belong to you, and you should end up okay.

My best guess based on what you're saying is that Google thought all of your domains were under separate ownership, and to see them all 301 all at once looks like you just bought a bunch of other domains and redirected them to yours.