Doorway page penalty
-
Has Google changed their interpretation of Doorway pages?We do not sell widgets but allow me to use Widget for this example;If we sold 25 very different widgets an online vendor would typically have 1 "mother" website with 25 different inner pages, each page to explain each type of widget they sell.However, for the past 9 years our approach is to have 25 different websites, one for each widget. With these 25 sites we concentrated on ranking the home page only . All these sites link back to our (No idexed) "Mother' site via no follow links where we have our Shopping Cart and Terms of Business. We did this partly to avoid having 25 separate Shopping Carts and to avoid having to change our Terms 25 times each time that became necessary. But yes we also did this as it was so much easier to rank each different type of widget in the SERPS. Also we think its a better user experience as in our business buyers of yellow widgets will not be interested in blue widgetsWe have been reading for years that google does not like doorways pages but we were not 100% certain if they might regard our sites as such .This is because our approach has worked great for nine years. That is until December last year when all 95% our sites fell dramatically in the SERPS usually from page 1 to page 2 or 3. First thing we did was to go through all our sites and search for the obvious; toxic links, duplicate content, keyword density, https issues, mobility issues, anchor text, etc etc and of course content. We found no obvious problems that could affect 95% of the sites at the same time but we ordered new homepage content for most of our sites from expert seo writers. However, after putting on this new content 3 -4 weeks ago our sites have not moved up the SERPS at all.So we are left with the inescapable conclusion that our problem is because google sees and devalues our sites as doorway pages especially as 95% of your sites have been affected all at the same time Would any SEO experts on this forum agree or be able to offer an opinion?If so, what might be the solution going forward? We have 2 solutions under consideration;1) Remove all links from each of our 25 sites to our "mother Site" and put a shopping cart and our TOS on each of the 25 sites so they are all truly independent stand alone websites.2) Create 25 inner pages on our mother site (after removing the no index) , for each of the 25 widgets we sell , then 301 each of the 25 individual sites home pages to its inner page on the mother site . I think this might be the best solution partly as almost all of our higher ranking competitors are ranking their inner pages not their homepage. But I worry if these 25 sites will really pass much link juice if they have been devalued by Google.?Any advice will be gratefully received.
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
-
Should remove 404 page
Hello, I upload a new website with new web addresses and my current addresses don't work anymore. I don't want to do redirects. Should I just remove the old address from google index using their tool or let google do it on its own. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Disavow without penalty
Hi fellow Mozians, I have come up with a doubt today which I would appreciate your thoughts on. I have always been convinced that the disavowal tool can be used at any time as part of your backlink monitoring activities- if you see a dodgy backlink coming in you should add it to your disavowal file if you can't get it removed (which you probably can't). That is to say that the disavowal tool can be used pre-emptively to make sure a dodgy link does do your site any harm. However, this belief of mine has taken a bit of a beating this morning as another SEO suggested that the disavowal tool only has en effect if acompanied by a reconsideratiosn request, and that you can only file a reconsideration request if you have some kind of manual action. This logic describes that you can only disavowal when you have a penalty. This theory was backed up by this moz article from May 2013:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unirmk
https://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool
The comments didnt do much to settle my doubts. This Mat Cutts video, from November 2013 seems to confirm my belief however:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=86&v=eFJZXpnsRsc It seems perfectly reasonable that Google does allow pre-emptive disavowal-ing, not just because of the whole negative seo issue, but just because nasty links do happen naturally. Not all SEOs spend all their waking hours building links which they know they will have to disavowal later shoudl a penalty hit at some point, and it seems reasonable that an SEO should be able to say- "Link XYZ is nothing to do with me!" before Google excercises retribution. If, for example you get hired working for a company that HAD a penalty due to spammy link building in the past that has been lifted; but you see that Google periodically discovers the occasional spammy link it seems fair that you should be able to tell google that you want to voluntarily remove any "credit" that that link is giving you today, so as to avoid a penalty tomorrow. Your help would be much appreciated. Many thanks indeed. watch?time_continue=86&v=eFJZXpnsRsc0 -
Page 1 Reached, Further Page Improvements and What Next ?
Moz, I have a particularly tricky competitive keyword that i have finally climbed our website to the 10th position of page 1, i am particularly pleased about this as all of the website and content is German which i have little understanding of and i have little support on this, I am pleased with the content and layout of the page and i am monitoring all Google Analytics values very closely, as well as the SERP positions, So as far as further progression with this page and hopefully climbing further up page 1, where do you think i should focus my efforts ? Page Speed optimization?, Building links to this page ?, blogging on this topic (with links) , Mobile responsive design (More difficult), further improvements to pages and content linked from this page ? Further improvements to the website in general?,further effort on tracking visitors and user experience monitoring (Like setting up Crazyegg or something?) Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated, Thanks all, James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Antony_Towle0 -
Should we show(to google) different city pages on our website which look like home page as one page or different? If yes then how?
On our website, we show events from different cities. We have made different URL's for each city like www.townscript.com/mumbai, www.townscript.com/delhi. But the page of all the cities looks similar, only the events change on those different city pages. Even our home URL www.townscript.com, shows the visitor the city which he visited last time on our website(initially we show everyone Mumbai, visitor needs to choose his city then) For every page visit, we save the last visited page of a particular IP address and next time when he visits our website www.townscript.com, we show him that city only which he visited last time. Now, we feel as the content of home page, and city pages is similar. Should we show these pages as one page i.e. Townscript.com to Google? Can we do that by rel="canonical" ? Please help me! As I think all of these pages are competing with each other.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sanchitmalik0 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
On Page vs Off Page - Which Has a Greater Effect on Rankings?
Hi Mozzers, My site will be migrating to a new domain soon, and I am not sure how to spend my time. Should I be optimizing our content for keywords, improving internal linking, and writing new content - or should I be doing link building for our current domain (or the new one)? Is there a certain ratio that determines rankings which can help me prioritize these to-dos?, such as 70:30 in favor of link-building? Thanks for any help you can offer!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Duplicated Pages and Forums
Does duplicate content hurt that particular duplicated content, or the entire site? There are some parts of my site that I don’t care about getting high rankings on search engines. For example, I have a forum and there are certain links that only logged in people can see. If you aren’t logged in, they will take you to a page where it tells u to log in. google, obviously not logged in, interprets this as lots and lots of the same duplicated page. Should I just leave it alone cause I dont care if those pages makes it to search engines. Will it not hurt the entire site? For example, can my homepage search rankings decrase? That leads to my next question. What is the best way to optimize a forum? Whenever someone posts a new post, it seems another url for the same forum thread is created..... which is obviously duplicated….in other words, if like 20 people post on a thread, i believe my site adds 20 urls for that page...anyone know how to fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waltergah0 -
Should we deindex duplicate pages?
I work on an education website. We offer programs that are offered up to 6 times per year. At the moment, we have a webpage for each instance of the program, but that's causing duplicate content issues. We're reworking the pages so the majority of the content will be on one page, but we'll still have to keep the application details as separate pages. 90% of the time, application details are going to be nearly identical, so I'm worried that these pages will still be seen as duplicate content. My question is, should we deindex these pages? We don't particularly want people landing on our application page without seeing the other details of the program anyway. But, is there problem with deindexing such a large chunk of your site that I'm not thinking of? Thanks, everyone!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UWPCE0