How to do a non-spammy "doorway page"?
-
Hi there,
ISSUE:
I have a client who wishes to use a "doorway" page, but not in a spammy way. He would like to have a nice crisp URL for use in ads/brochures. The page is strictly a landing page (just with a separate URL).
DOORWAY/LANDING PAGE WILL BE:
Non-spammy -- There will be no attempt to optimize the landing page/no attempt to get the page to rank.
Strictly a vanity URL -- he likes the way a separate website looks in ads as opposed to a landing page on the existing website (i.e., www.websitename.com/landing page)
WHAT I'M TRYING TO DO:
I'm basically trying to figure out what the best things to do to protect his other sites (which are very high quality valuable sites which rank well) from getting punished.
STEPS I'M CONSIDERING:
Robots no follow
Separate hosting server
Different person's name on a private domain registration
Adding additional pages, so it's not a 1-page "doorway"
Many thanks in advance to anyone who would share their experience and help me protect my client in the best way possible. I've told him there are risks, but he still wants to go ahead.
MC
-
Thanks so much! That answers my question.
-
Sorry, I think I confused myself after I read the replies
Meta Robots (NOINDEX) is probably your best bet, then. Canonical would be a decent bet if you expected the landings pages to have inbound links or other ranking signals (like a 301, they can help consolidate those signals). If it's a landing page purely for purposes outside of organic search, though, simply blocking it is fine.
-
Hi,
Thanks so much for your responses.
To clarify, as I said in my original question:
"There will be no attempt to optimize the landing page/no attempt to get the page to rank."Adding NO FOLLOW makes perfect sense.
One follow up question...
I'm not sure if I would need the REL=Canonical if there's no duplication issue? Would NO FOLLOW be enough to handle any issues?
Thanks again,
MC -
Just to clarify on a point William raised - do you want the "doorway" page to rank? That's where the trouble usually starts. Vanity URLs and landing pages are fine - if you canonical them, NOINDEX (or even 301-redirect, if you don't care if the URL changes), then Google isn't going to see any attempt at manipulative content.
The other issue is generally relevance. The problem in the past was when people used a doorway page to bring visitors in on one term or set of terms and then that was just a link to a wildly different site. If the landing page is relevant and non-duplicate, it's not nearly as big of a deal.
Personally, I would not do private registration, separate hosting, etc., because that honestly looks like you are trying to hide this page and get away with something. Just don't index the page, and you should be fine. I've used landing pages for paid search on all kinds of URLs, and as long as organic didn't see them, it's no problem at all.
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
-
Non-wildcard SSL risky for SEO?
I have a potential client who doesn't seem to be using wildcard SSLs in a multi-site scenario (over 40 sites) - what I'm wondering is the scope of Google's inspection of a site's SSL in this case: https://www.domain.com (good to go) https://domain.com (certificate error) Will Googlebot/Google possibly consider the entire TLD insecure? Could the secured, www-version of the site end up with the "Site is not secure" message in the SERPs as well? Could this invisibly affect the client's rankings? PS: Yes, I know that the right thing to do is go wildcard, but I need an answer to this before recommending a large purchase to them.
Web Design | | scottclark0 -
Doing SEO for single page applications / Prerender.io
My dev and I are migrating an existing multi page application to a single page application with prerender.io. Does anybody have any experience with doing SEO for single page applications? Any other consequences we should take into account? Anything important to expect. Any insights would be 10/10 appreciated.
Web Design | | Edward_Sturm0 -
Major home page change!
Hi Mozzers, Making a major homepage change on my site Orangeoctop.us. I am going from featuring content to featuring products, similar to how moz and hubspot feature their content on the homepage. Just to give you some numbers, the homepage only sees 2.6% of the total traffic and of that traffic half is direct. The homepage is going to be changed to OrangeOctop.us/guides. My Question: Is there anything that should be added to the homepage to ensure that I keep the same domain authority/page authority?
Web Design | | orangeoctop.us0 -
Local Versions of Pages
I have a site that offers services across two states and was wondering if I would see any benefit from creating pages such as: SERVICE in CITY, TX Would I need to change the content on the pages completely or could I simply swap out the city/state if I have roughly 3-5 combos I want target?
Web Design | | nusani0 -
Sub-pages with more links than homepage - bad?
Hi,
Web Design | | rayvensoft
I am working on merging a number of my niche websites into a larger site (301 redirects, phased in over a few months). My question/concern is whether google will penalize the main site when it sees that the homepage has almost no links to it, and that about 10-15 sub-pages have a lot of links back to it. Does anybody have experience with this kind of scenario? Will it create a problem? Theoretically I could spend a year or so building up links to the new main page - building the brand - before doing the 301's. The smaller pages still bring in clients, but it is getting hard to maintain that many micro sites. Thanks in advance for any help.0 -
How much content is too much? Best Pages For Content?
To my understanding content has a lot to do with organic rankings if written correctly. My question is, how much content is too much and what pages are best to place content. Our company sells very costly products. Our customers call to purchase, we do not have an eCommerce site. Write now we have on average 350 words per page. We have about 200+ pages. Each page is written for that general category and each product has its own unique content. It seems to me that the pages with less content, tend to rank a bit better. As we are in the process of redoing our website, is there any recommendations on writing content, or adjusting the amount of text. I am thinking a lot of our text is informative only to a certain extent. Would writing content just for the main category page be better, and then on the actual product page, have only about 250 words as a description? Are there any other recommendations for SEO that are fairly new? Besides the Title, Description, Heading Tags, Image Alts, URLS etc.
Web Design | | hfranz0 -
Combining web pages and it's affects on SEO?
We are looking into amending a website we are working on to try and combine 2 or 3 current pages onto one page. This site is similar to an estate agents site and currently has images, map, floor plan sub pages etc. Can anyone tell me, if we were to combine these pages and include the above details on one page, how that would affect the current search engine rankings?
Web Design | | SoundinTheory0