Landing Page or Doorway ?- that is the question!
-
Hi Guys,
So, I'm looking at a project to build a series of landing pages that cross map cities with Suname. E.g. Sydney + Smyth, New York + Fitzpatrick. On those pages I'll pull in from our directory relevant name based listings and try and display some other tailored / information. The page itself is the end goal - it is definitely not a doorway in the classic sense of encouraging someone to then go on the main site. I want the user to fill out a form on this page because they realise they've landed on a valuable service.
I'm looking at potentially 500 names against 2000 locations, creating 1,000,000 landing pages. Although some of the content will be repetitive I genuinely believe someone doing the appropriate search and finding our page will derive value from our page as our whole business is designed to answer their needs. However I'm worried that Google may classify these pages as doorway pages. Could anyone please shine the light of experience on this for me?
Thanks!
-
Thanks EGOL. Good practial advice! I'll take it into consideration. I guess I just reckon that this approach will cover the long tail to a marginal extent and I can ramp up my efforts in a more hands on way for the main traffic searches.
-
I used to have some big sites made with databases. The challenge with sites of 100,000 pages or 1,000,000 pages is having enough PR to get then into the index and hold them in the index.
If you have a big site you need to have a regular flow of spiders into and out of every page or google will forget them and they will fall out of the index. Even if they stay in the index they will be poorly competitive.
One of my sites had about 150,000 pages and to get and hold it in the index took a lot of links. Today I bet that you would need at least 30 PR5 links that connected deeply into the site to maintain an adequate flow of spiders for healthy indexing for a site of that size. A site with a million pages is going to require a lot more.
So, in addition to creating this site you are going to need some powerful link sources for indexing.
-
Hi EGOL,
Thanks for the swift response. That makes a lot of sense and correlates to how I thought Google approached this issue. I guess I want to just suck it and see if Google will de-index the pages - I am aware that there will not be vastly unique content on all of them but on a steadily increasing percentage. What I am very worried about is being permanently punished if they feel I'm doing something very wrong, or having my entire site downgraded (as I have heard can happen for doorway pages) or having those pages with poor content not be reindexable in 4 months time when there is better content on them.
Do you have any thoughts on these concerns.
Thanks
-
Google crawlers are unable to determine if you are offering a "valuable service".
However, if you have a program crank out a million pages that all look like this.....
"yada yada yada LOCATION yada yada yada SURNAME yada yada yada yada"
"yada yada yada LOCATION yada yada yada SURNAME yada yada yada yada"
"yada yada yada LOCATION yada yada yada SURNAME yada yada yada yada"
.... Google will probably index them and display them in the SERPs for a few days.... (and you might make a little money)... but then you will see the number of pages in their index decline rapidly as they figure out that these are cookiie-cutter-pages and toss them out as duplicate content.
However, if you have the resources to write a million pages of absolutely unique, non-duplicating content then you might make a lot of money from this 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
-
Nuisance visitors to non active page. What's going on?
Hi Guys, for the past several months, I get high volume of searches on a non-existing page /h/9249823.html. These searches come from all over the world from different domains and have a zero session duration. They are automatically forwarded to my home page. The source re Google Analytics is 12-reasons-for-seo.com. The full referrer is 12.reasons-for-seo.com/seo2php. Any idea what is provoking this activity? Any chance it's screwing with my legitimate search results or rankings?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Lysarden0 -
More pages is good for SEO? Is this true?
Hi Guys I have a question, I was told the more pages I have the better for SEO, Is this true?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
I have plenty of backlinks but the site does not seem to come up on Google`s first page.
My site has been jumping up and down for many months now. but it never stays on Google first page. I have plenty of back-links, shared content on social media. But what could i be doing wrong? any help will be appreciated. Content is legit. I have recently added some internal links is this might be the cause? Please help .
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | samafaq0 -
Page keeps dropping
Hello All, I have a page (http://www.caravanguard.co.uk/touring-caravan-insurance/) we have seen it drop a bit over recent months and now we have been appearing low on page two (Google UK) for the term "Caravan Insurance". Now I do not expect to rank above some of the big players in our market and the aggregators, but we do feel we have good content and have tried to act as white as we can in terms of SEO, link building and alike, but we are still slipping. My main issue is this - one minute we have the link appearing in the serps and then the next it drops from the serps altogether. At this point i often resubmit for indexing in webmaster tools and a few minutes later its back.... is this just likley something I am seeing local to me due search becoming more personal (I have toggle hide private results too) or is there a cause to its sudden disappearance and reappearance? Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TimHolmes0 -
Schema for Landing Pages
Hi guys, I do a lot of landing pages for cars and would like to know what the best practices are for some things in Schema, so I can enhance their web presence. I would like to make some bullet points of the features of the vehicles show up in Google search results. What would be the best way to make this happen with Schema? Also, can I use coordinates in the code to make the landing page show up on a search result saying "2014 Volkswagen Beetle near me," rather than "2014 Volkswagen Beetle near Clarence, NY?" Can I make an image of the brand or car show up in the search results along with the meta description (kind of what bloggers do). Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | oomdomarketing0 -
Question Regarding Keyword
Hi All, I am currently working on a travel site. Would for example Boutique Hotels in New York | Luxury Hotels in New York be considered keyword stuffing?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | appnyc0 -
Unnatural Link Notification - Third Go Round, specific questions
Hi all, I'm posting what is sure to be a common question, but I can't seem to find much information by searching Q&A over the last month so thought I'd throw this out there. There's a lot of 'what do I do??' questions about 'unnatural link notification', but most of them are from first timers. We're pretty far along in the process and it feels like we're going nowhere, so I was hoping to pick the brains of anyone else who's 'been there'. We have a client that we inherited with an unnatural link profile; they were warned shortly after we took them on (around March was the first warning). We compiled an apologetic letter, specifically identified a previous agency who >was< doing bad things, mentioned things would be different from now on, and provided a list of links we were working on to remove based on WMT and OSE and some other sources. This was submitted in early June. Traffic on the main keyword plummeted; ranking went from top 5 to about mid-page 4. We got hit with that same rash of Unnatural Link warnings on July 23 that everyone else did and after looking around I decided not to respond to those. We got a response to the reinclusion request submitted in June above, saying the site was still violating guidelines. This time I went all out, and provided a Google docs spreadsheet of the over 1,500 links we had removed, listed the other links that had no contact info (not even in WHOIS), listed the links we had emailed/contact formed but got no response, everything. So they responded to that recently, simply saying 'site still violates guidelines' with no other details, and I'm not sure what else I can do. The campaign above was quite an investment of resources and time, but I'm not sure how to most efficiently continue. I promised specific questions, so here they are: Are the link removal services (rmoov, removeem, linkdelete, et al) worth investigating? To remove the 1,500 links I mentioned above I had a full time (low paid) person working for a week. Does Google even reconsider after long engagements like this? Most of what I've read has said that inclusion gets cleared up on the first/second request, and we're at bat for the third now. Due to the lack of feedback I don't know if their opinion is "nope, you just missed some" or "you are so blackhat you shouldn't even bother asking anymore". One of the main link holders is this shady guy who runs literally thousands of directories the client appears in thanks to previous SEO agency, and wants $5 per link he removes. Should I mention this to Google, do they even care? Or is it solely our responsibility? Thanks in advance for any advice;
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | icecarats0 -
Why won't my home page rank for branded terms?
Hello, I've been trying to figure out what factors are causing my home page not to rank for my branded terms. The site is www.lipozene.com and after the late April Google algorithm our rankings have disappeared off the map for the term "lipozene". Different element of the site show up in organic rankings, including our shopping cart (http://shop.lipozene.com) as high as page two. However, the home page is not ranking organically. On Yahoo & Bing we have never dropped out of the number 1 spot. We did engage in some link building activities, however we've removed nearly all of the links that were created by our SEO guy. I did NOT receive any notifications from Google regarding their link policy. If you search for lipozene.com we rank #1. Any thoughts on what we're missing thats causing us to not rank is greatly apprecaited. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | lipoweb0