Landing Page or Doorway ?- that is the question!

[flow_seo]

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!

[flow_seo]

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.

[EGOL]

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.

[flow_seo]

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

[EGOL]

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.