Massive site-wide internal footer links to doorway pages: how bad is this?
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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!
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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.
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