Are Hotel Vanity Websites considered a Doorway Page to brand.com?
-
I work for a large 3rd party management company and we use vanity websites to help us market our hotels. They provide us the ability to better manage our content as well as provide value to our customers versus the brand site. An example would be Vanity: http://www.hiltonmonterey.com/Brand.com: http://hiltongardeninn3.hilton.com/en/hotels/california/hilton-garden-inn-monterey-MRYMHGI/index.htmlBased on my reading of Google's guidelines I am concerned that our vanity site may be interpreted as such. Please advise if this is the case.
-
Hi John
Nobody but Google can tell you for sure - but if I compare both pages & check the guidelines here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html the site doesn't look like a typical doorway page:
1.Is the purpose to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site, or are they an integral part of your site’s user experience?
=> the user experience on the vanity url is better than the standard page on the Hilton side. The only moment when you lead your visitors to the main site is when they want to book2.Are the pages intended to rank on generic terms yet the content presented on the page is very specific? You're site seems optimised for people searching for this specific hotel - not hotels in general or any other generic terms
3. Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic?
You don't exactly duplicate - you enrich the content in order to offer your visitors (and not the search engines) a better experience.4. Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic and sending users along without creating unique value in content or functionality?
This point is definitely not the case5. Do these pages exist as an “island?” Are they difficult or impossible to navigate to from other parts of your site? Are links to such pages from other pages within the site or network of sites created just for search engines?
Yes it is an island - but in that case you could see any hotel site as doorway page for a site like Booking.com when they use the Booking search engine.To be honest, I would not be too worried. The goal of this update to eliminate pages will low added value, that only exist to rank & to funnel visitors to the main site. The example you gave has a high added value, and you're not funnelling to the main site (apart for booking purposes).
Hope this helps,
Dirk
-
If a "vanity" web site is high quality, offers unique content, and that content is relevant to the specific search queries most accurate to the content provided on that site, it's a perfectly valid site.
If a multi-site environment was designed to have one company/business dominate search results for individual search phrases and if any of those sites created for that purpose are not unique enough but artificially designed to trick ranking domination, that's going to be a problem.
So that's the question - how high is the quality? how unique is the content? How helpful is the "vanity" 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
-
2 Similar Pages
Hello, I have two very similar pages. The first page is an apartment rental page with a map, rental listings and some neighborhood data below. The neighborhood data includes useful info about the area with photos, text about the area, crime rates, avg. rental rates, etc. The second page is a neighbourhood guide that includes virtually the same data as the rental page, but in longer form ie. more photos, more text, etc. I want the rental page to rank, while ranking the neighborhood page is not important as it would be used more for link bait. But since the information on the two pages is the same, I don't want them to compete with each other. I'm thinking of putting a cannonical tag on the neighborhood page pointing back to the rental page. Is that the correct thing to do in this instance? Thanks for your help. J
On-Page Optimization | | torontojon0 -
Page rank question
Hi all, pretty standard SEO question that I'm sure you are all getting asked day in, day out... the following page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/ It's targetting keywords "portable dvd", "portable DVD player", "portable DVD players" & "portable dvd player for car". The page gets a grade A via Moz analytics On-page grader for the keywords. We have incoming links and I believe the page is structured correctly with all meta tags, H1 etc and tried not too overload the tags with keywords. We have the keywords in the URL etc. We are still stuck on page 2 for all phrases. Any thoughts or suggestions as to what we are doing wrong please? Any help would be great.
On-Page Optimization | | jasef0 -
Wrong Page is Ranking
My client is an Ecommerce reseller of a few major scooter brands. We currently rank fifth for a particular brand name but our main brand page isn't the one that ranks. Instead, it's a product page. The main brand page has an A rating from Moz for the desired keyword phrases. Neither page has any backlinks. Any ideas on why our main brand page would be outranked by a product page? What could we do to change this?
On-Page Optimization | | TrinShin0 -
Home page or landing page?
Hello, I want to ask a question related to that - Should we put keywords in the home page title if we wish to position another landing page better for particular keywords? I have read in one website about SEO that it's good the main keywords of your website to be positioned in homepage title also. f.e. Let's say we have website about web-design and our company is named Company Ltd. The title of the home page is "Company Ltd. - Web design, SEO, etc" We have also another inner page named "Web design | Company Ltd.". So should we leave the first page name only "Company Ltd." and the landing page's name "Web design | Company Ltd." . I don't know if they both have the same keyword in their title they won't compete with each other.
On-Page Optimization | | HrishikeshKarov0 -
Too many on-page links
Hi, My website - www.thepartyhouse.com.au is showing as having too many on-page links for over 4,000 pages. Take for example the homepage which is showing as 188 links, but I don't understand this because I've used SEO tools to display the links and I am showing around 90 links on this page. How can I see what all the links are? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Spyre0 -
Duplicate Page Title
Hi Guys, First off, it's an honour to be a part of this awesome community. I'm using WordPress and getting top 3 rankings for great keywords and I'm very excited, however my page titles are in this format "keyword optimised title here - site name here" eg: "This is my keyword - this is the name of my blog", "This is another keyword - this is the name of my blog", "This is a longtail keyword - this is the name of my blog" SEOMoz is reporting errors because of duplicate page title tags due to the "this is the name of my blog" being in every page title. Will this hurt my rankings? Thanks in advance and keep up the great work! Cheers, Troy.
On-Page Optimization | | TroyDean710 -
Woah, my A-grade optimized pages that were on the first page have all vanished outside the top 50 in Google... is this Panda?
Yep as mentioned, I had some pages hit the top ten pretty quickly after ensuring they were A-grade for pretty uncompetitive keywords however, today, all bar 2 have just vanished from the top 50! All were ranking in Google.co.uk and I know we were predicting the Panda update to hit soon but WOW! My client is understandably a little upset, what on earch do I tell him and what should I do about it? Cheers! jT
On-Page Optimization | | Switch_Digital0 -
Are footer links at the end of each page still considered to be a valid tactic?
This is pretty much an opinion question, I was under the impression that footer links had been devalued almost to the point of uselessness, and if they weren't going to be of any real use to the users of the site why bother. I was speaking to a web developer though whose opinion I do largely trust who remains very pro footer links, and I was wondering what everyone else thought. Am I being too dismissive, or are footer links on the way out?
On-Page Optimization | | Tompt0