How best to clean up doorway pages. 301 them or follow no index ?
-
Hi Mozzers,
I have what is classed as doorway pages on my website. These have historically been location specific landing pages for some of our categories but from speaking to a number of different webmasters , then general consensus is that they are not in google guidelines so I will be getting punished by having them.
My options are :
-
I can 301 the pages back to their original category pages . This will conserve some link juice to pass back to the respective category page.
-
I can set these as Follow No index. Not sure what will happen here with regards to link value etc.
What would be best ?... Some of the pages do currently rank "fairly well" for some of the locations so I am getting traffic from them but I also know I will be getting a algorithmic penalty for having them so how best I clean these up ?.
Also , by cleaning up the site structure , would I see any benefit here ? or will I have to wait for a new panda update/ refresh ? I thought the panda refresh won't use a new dataset
thanks
Pete
-
-
Key point by Rebecca, use data to make this decision. I just 410'ed almost 800 old pages/articles from a website I help run. They were all republished press releases that were at least 2 years old, they got less than 9 organic pageviews over the past 6 month period and no link equity. You have to do some work with merging this data from GA and OSE, but it is worth it. I could say that when I deleted these 800 pages I was not losing significant traffic or links and I was improving my crawl efficiency with Google and potentially a quality factor with Google as they were not having to look at crappy old content. Another way to say this is that if users were not visiting the pages nor were they linking to them, how could they be useful and if anything would make my site look less reputable to them.
Cheers!
FYI - the spider Screaming Frog (one of my fav tools) just integrated with the GA API, so you can crawl and get GA data combined. (You can also just play with GA filters as well). If Screaming Frog can get the tool to access the Moz API - BOOM! That would make this work so much easier. (Hint hint mozzers this would be an amazing tool for the Moz crawler as well!)
-
Hello,
Well these pages are onsite but I've been told they can also be classed as doorway pages or at best, spammy..
So for example - you can see below I have a main "cleaning Equipment category" and I also have cleaning equipment category pages for different locations , so these would serve carpet cleaners in London , carpet cleaners in Brighton , carpet cleaners in manchester and so on.
www.site.co.uk/cleaning-equipment/carpet-cleaners
www.site.co.uk/cleaning-equipment-london/carpet-cleaners
www.site.co.uk/cleaning-equipment-brighton/carpet-cleaners
www.site.co.uk/cleaning-equipment-manchester/carpet-cleaners
www.site.co.uk/cleaning-equipment-liverpool/carpet-cleanersAll the location pages have unique content , title tags , h1 tags etc but I've been told they look spammy and they are in effect doorway pages as I trying to get a local search footprint in different cities. .
what I want to change it to , is just have the www.site.co.uk/cleaning-equipment/carpet-cleaners page and either 301 the location pages or follow no index them.
thanks
Pete
-
By "doorway pages" you just mean a thin, off-site landing page which quickly funnels a visitor onto your main site, correct?
If it hasn't been hit with a manual penalty, it ranks well, AND it's got links worth keeping (note the qualifier there), I'd go for the 301. But only if it can meet all three of those criteria. If it didn't, then I'd let it 404.
-
Hi there
Honestly, I would get rid of them if they are blatantly doorway pages. The point of a doorway page is to show crawlers one thing and then a user another thing that are unrelated. Unless those pages are useful, ranking for relevant terms, and can be redirected to a relevant page (at which point they aren't doorway pages), then I would do that.
I would make sure what you have are doorway pages, and if they are, just lose them and build equity in pages that should be ranking for those queries.
When it comes to your site architecture - I would make sure that's top notch regardless of upcoming algorithms. Never build a site in fear of updates, always build it for the best possible user experience and make sure that it's living up to their expectations. Make users happy, and the search engines will reward you.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
Service Area Location Pages vs. User Experience
I'm familiar with the SAB best practices outlined here. Here's my issue: Doing local landing pages as described here might not be ideal from a user experience point of view. Having a "Cities We Serve" or "Service Areas" link in the main navigation isn't necessarily valuable to the user when the city-specific landing pages are all places within a 15-mile radius of the SAB's headquarters. It would just look like the company did it for SEO. It wouldn't look natural. Seriously, it feels like best practices are totally at odds with user experience here. If I absolutely must create location pages for 10 or so municipalities within my client's service area, I'd rather NOT put the service areas as a primary navigation item. It is not useful to the user. Anyone who sees that the company provides services in the [name of city] metropolitan area will already understand that the company can service their town that is 5 miles away. It is self-evident. For example**, who would wonder whether a plumbing company with a Los Angeles address also services Beverly Hills?** It's just... silly. But the Moz guide says I've got to do those location pages! And that I've got to put them high up in the navigation! This is a problem because we've got to do local SEO, but we also have to provide an ideal experience. Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | Greenery1 -
Best SEO Option for Multi-site Set-up
Hi Guys, We have a Business to Business Software Website. We are Global business but mainly operate in Ireland, UK and USA. I would like your input on best practice for domain set-up for best SEO results in local markets. Currently we have: example.com (no market specified) and now we are creating: example.com/ie (Ireland) example.com/uk (united kingdom) example.com/us (united states) My question is mainly based on the example.com/us website - should we create example.com/us for the US market OR just use example.com for the US the market? If the decision is example.com/us should we build links to the directory or the main .com website. To summarize there is two questions: 1. Advise on domain set-up 2. Which site to build links to if example.com/us is the decision. Thank you in advance, Glen.
Local Website Optimization | | DigitalCRO0 -
My pages are absolutely plummeting. HELP!
Hi all, Several of my pages have absolutely tanked in the past fortnight, and I've no idea why. One of them, according to Moz, has a Page Optimisation Score of 96, and it's dropped from 10th to 20th. Our DA is lower than our competitors, but still, that's a substantial drop. Sadly, this has been replicated across the site. Any suggestions? Cheers, Rhys
Local Website Optimization | | SwanseaMedicine0 -
Structuring URLs of profile pages
First of all, I want to thank everyone for the feedback that I received on the first question. My next question has to do with the URL structure of personal trainer profiles pages on www.rightfitpersonaltraining.com. Currently, the structure of each trainer profile page is "www.rightfitpersonaltraining.com/personal-trainers/trainer/" and at the end I manually add the trainer's "city-firstname-lastinitial". Would it be to my benefit to have the developers change the structure so that the trainer profile URLs are "www.rightfitpersonaltraining.com/city-personal-trainers/trainername"? That way, each trainer profile would link directly to the trainer's city page as opposed to the general "personal-trainers" page. I don't mind paying a little extra to go back into the site to make these changes, as I think they would benefit the search ranking for each city page.
Local Website Optimization | | mkornbl20 -
Sub domain for geo pages
Hello Group! I have been tossing the idea in my head of using sub domains for the geo pages for each of my clients. For example: one of my clients is a lawyer in a very competitive Atlanta market http://bestdefensega.com. Can I set his geo page to woodstock.bestdefensega.com? Is this a viable option? Will I get penalized? Thoughts or suggestions always appreciated! Thanks in Advance
Local Website Optimization | | underdogmike0 -
How Google's Doorway Pages Update Affects Local SEO
Hey Awesome Local Folks! I thought I'd take a proactive stance and start a thread on the new doorway pages update from Google, as I feel there will be questions coming up about this here in the forum: Here's the update announcement: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html And here's the part that will make local business owners and Local SEOs take a second glance at this: Here are questions to ask of pages that could be seen as doorway pages: 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? I think this will naturally lead to questions about the practice of creating local/city landing pages. At this point, my prediction is that this will come down to high quality vs. crummy quality pages of this type. In fact, after chatting briefly with Andrew Shotland, I'm leaning a bit toward seeing the above language as being strongly geared toward directory type sites and large franchises. I recommend reading Andrew's post about his take on this, as I think he's on the right track: http://www.localseoguide.com/googles-about-to-close-your-local-doorway-pages/ So, I'm feeling at this point that if you've made the right efforts to develop unique, high quality local landing pages, you should be good unless you are an accidental casualty of an over-zealous update. We'll see! If anyone has thoughts to contribute on this thread, I hope they will, and if lots of questions start coming up about this here in the community, feel free to link back to this thread in helping your fellow community members 🙂 Thanks, all!
Local Website Optimization | | MiriamEllis9 -
Where should I 301 redirect my current domain to given this situation?
My company currently owns three apartment complexes. They are within blocks of each other. Only one of them has a website (believe it or not). The one that has the website ranks fairly well, but only because it has been around for a long time. There have not been any intentional SEO efforts. I have stumbled across a wonderful, keyword rich & location specific, domain name but I have a question. Here's the scenario: We have: Apartment Complex 1 - www.apartmentcomplex1.com (longstanding website) Apartment Complex 2 - No website. Apartment Complex 3 - No website. We are considering buying the domain: www.KeywordRichDomain.com. The new URL structure would be: www.KeywordRichDomain.com/apartment-complex-1 www.KeywordRichDomain.com/apartment-complex-2 www.KeywordRichDomain.com/apartment-complex-3 Should I 301 redirect www.apartmentcomplex1.com to the new root domain or should I redirect it to the appropriate sub-folder of the new domain? Putting myself in the user's shoes, if I were expecting to go to the apartmentcomplex1.com domain, I would want to land on the sub-folder because it's relevant to what I was looking for. However, I don't think people will directly type in the old URL. I think people will be searching for apartments in the area and I want all three of our complexes to show up. By redirecting the good domain to this new root domain, it should help us start out life pretty well in the SERPS. (my assumption at least). Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | MeasureEverything0 -
International Site Geolocation Redirection (best way to redirect and allow Google bots to index sites)
I have a client that has an international website. The website currently has IP detection and redirects you to the subdomain for your country. They have currently only launched the Australian website and are not yet open to the rest of the world: https://au.domain.com/ Google is not indexing the Australian website or pages, instead I believe that the bots are being blocked by the IP redirection every time they try to visit one of the Australian pages. Therefore only the US 'coming soon' page is being properly indexed. So, I would like to know the best way to place a geolocation redirection without creating a splash page to select location? User friendliness is most important (so we don't want cookies etc). I have seen this great Whiteboard Friday video on Where to Host and How to Target, which makes sense, but what it doesn't tell me is exactly the best method for redirection except at about 10:20 where it tells me what I'm doing is incorrect. I have also read a number of other posts on IP redirection, but none tell me the best method, and some are a little different examples... I need for US visitors to see the US coming soon page and for Google to index the Australian website. I have seen a lot about JS redirects, IP redirects and .htaccess redirects, but unfortunately my technical knowledge of how these affect Google's bots doesn't really help. Appreciate your answers. Cheers, Lincoln
Local Website Optimization | | LincolnSmith0