Are these doorway pages or not? Concerned due to Panda 4.0
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For a new site we're building, the Products team wants the header (let's call this Product-Header) to have links to every subsection of every section on every page. Since this is a bad idea, I want Product-Header to be coded in such a way that it doesn't appear in the code or the links are nofollow, noindex.
I want to instead create static versions of these pages without the Product-Header. The homepage links to the static URL section pages, those main section pages link to static subsection pages, and so on. It's one nice silo.
I am concerned though that Google won't like this due to these static pages are being created specifically for search engines. Users could click through to this static parallel site from the homepage, or they could use the dynamic URL site.
This is similar to what etsy.com is doing where you can search Google for "mermaid bridal" and get this page https://www.etsy.com/market/mermaid_bridal but the dynamic version of the page does not show up. However you can search on etsy.com for " mermaid bridal" and get https://www.etsy.com/search?q=mermaid bridal&ship_to=US.
Could these static versions that show up in search engines be seen as doorway pages? I know ebay.com got spanked for doorway pages and I don't want to do anything that would get this site penalized.
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Hi There
Just to clarify, by definition there are not doorway pages - doorway pages function by redirecting the user to another page than the one that was indexed. These would just be additional pages indexed that more or less show the same content as other pages.
That aside though, it's good to still question their validity. What Etsy is doing is a bit more complex and I wouldn't compare your site to Etsy (unless it's going to be millions of pages with hundreds or thousands of categories). But Etsy is doing something slightly different than what you're describing for your site.
If you want to create the silo effect you can simply "nofollow" any links you don't want them to continue crawling off of the homepage. And in general I would try to control everything through good architecture.
Now, for Etsy, if you have two similar pages showing in search - one a /search/ URL and the other a /Market/ URL - that, in my opinion is not ideal. I would noindex the search pages that are also duplicated by static pages.
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