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Hey Everyone,

So I am the SEO at a mid-sized nationwide retailer and have been working there for almost a year and half. This retailer is an SEO nightmare. Imagine the worst possible SEO nightmare, and that is my unfortunate yet challenging everyday reality.

In light of the new algorithm update that seems to be on the horizon from Google to further crack down on the usage of doorway pages, I am coming to the Moz community for some desperately needed help.

Before I was employed here, the eCommerce director and SEM Manager connected with a vendor that told them basically that they can do a PPC version of SEO for long-tail keywords. This vendor sold them on the idea that they will never compete with our own organic content and can bring in incremental traffic and revenue due to all of this wonderful technology they have that is essentially just a scraper.

So for the past three years, this vendor has been creating thousands of doorway pages that are hosted on their own server but our masked as our own pages. They do have a massive index / directory in HTML attached to our website and even upload their own XML site maps to our Google Web Master Tools. So even though they “own” the pages, they masquerade as our own organic pages.

So what we have today is thousands upon thousands of product and category pages that are essentially built dynamically and regurgitated through their scraper / platform, whatever.

ALL of these pages are incredibly thin in content and it’s beyond me how Panda has not exterminated them.

ALL of these pages are built entirely for search engines, to the point that you would feel like the year was 1998.

All of these pages are incredibly over- optimized with spam that really is equivalent to just stuffing in a ton of meta keywords. (like I said – 1998)

Almost ALL of these scraped doorway pages cause an incredible amount of duplicate content issues even though the “account rep” swears up and down to the SEM Manager (who oversees all paid programs) that they do not.

Many of the pages use other shady tactics such as meta refresh style bait and switching.

For example:

The page title in the SERP shows as: Personalized Watch Boxes

When you click the SERP and land on the doorway page the title changes to:

Personalized Wrist Watches. Not one actual watch box is listed.

They are ALL simply the most god awful pages in terms of UX that you will ever come across BUT because of the sheer volume of this pages spammed deep within the site, they create revenue just playing the odds game.

Executives LOVE revenue.

Also, one of this vendor’s tactics when our budget spend is reduced for this program is to randomly pull a certain amount of their pages and return numerous 404 server errors until spend bumps back up. This causes a massive nightmare for me.

I can go on and on but I think you get where I am going.

I have spent a year and half campaigning to get rid of this black-hat vendor and I am finally right on the brink of making it happen. The only problem is, it will be almost impossible to not drop in revenue for quite some time when these pages are pulled. Even though I have helped create several organic pages and product categories that will pick-up the slack when these are pulled, it will still be awhile before the dust settles and stabilizes.

I am going to stop here because I can write a novel and the millions of issues I have with this vendor and what they have done. I know this was a very long and open-ended essay of this problem I have presented to you guys in the Moz community and I apologize and would love to clarify anything I can.

My actual questions would be:

Has anyone gone through a similar situation as this or have experience dealing with a vendor that employs this type of black-hat tactic?

Is there any advice at all that you can offer me or experiences that you can share that can help be as armed as I can when I eventually convince the higher-ups they need to pull the plug?

How can I limit the bleeding and can I even remotely rely on Google LSI to serve my organic pages for the related terms of the pages that are now gone?

Thank you guys so much in advance,

-Ben

Thanks so much for the response.

Your advice on having a battle plan is perfect and is something that I have had to try, try try try and once I am done trying, I try again to find more creative ways to present SEO needs, site fixes and strategies.

I even went so far to show them what their page title look like in search when they are 90 characters long and compared them to that shady gas station on an isolated highway when we could be optimizing the titles, increase CTR and add some schema to product page SERPS to make them look like Sheetz!

Full PowerPoint pictures of gas stations!

The enigma of pushing SEO when nothing is "guaranteed" but the numbers they are seeing from this black-hat vendor are.

Yesterday, digging deeper and deeper using Screaming Frog, I dug into one of this vendor's sub folders that is a giant index (They have three of these sub folders they upload to our site)

I actually found that they are literally completely copying our product pages and making exact copies. They then insert basically meta spam links on the product pages that ensures that their copies will usually always out rank our original content that we have three writers working on.

Unbelievable I know. So with your awesome advice and internal reminder on how much more I need to think outside the box with presenting, I am going to make an entire roster of this plagiarized pages and show them that if all of these copied product pages were removed, our own organic product pages would show as they are meant to.

I cannot believe vendors still can get away with this. No one monitored them or had any idea what they were doing until I was hired it is just beyond belief.

Thank you so much for the advice and inspiration.