Yesterday Google announced, in a post on its Webmaster Central Blog by Brian White, that it will soon launch a ranking adjustment to search results to improve the quality of address sites that “maximize their search footprint without adding clear, unique value.
The update aims to minimize the impact of web spam on users and includes the doorway pages.
“Doorway pages are sites or pages created to rank highly for specific search queries. They are bad for users because they can lead to multiple similar pages in user search results, where each result ends up taking the user to essentially the same destination. They can also lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination.” Source: Google Support
Google’s long-standing view about doorway pages is that they are created solely for search engines and can harm the quality of the user’s search experience by giving the user the same content over and over on different pages that turn up in the search queries.
“For example, searchers might get a list of results that all go to the same site. So if a user clicks on one result, doesn’t like it, and then tries the next result in the search results page and is taken to that same site that they didn’t like, that’s a really frustrating experience.” Source: Google Support
The soon to be launch ranking adjustment is to better address against these types of pages. Sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change.
Brian White, added an explanation of what are there exactly cataloging as doorway pages:
“Here are questions to ask of pages that could be seen as doorway pages:
Is the purpose to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site, or are they an integral part of your site’s user experience?
Are the pages intended to rank on generic terms yet the content presented on the page is very specific?
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?
Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic and sending users along without creating unique value in content or functionality?
Do these pages exist as an “island?” Are they difficult or impossible to navigate to from other parts of your site? Are links to such pages from other pages within the site or network of sites created just for search engines?”
So, in our opinion, bad time is ahead for the websites with doorway pages. What is your experience on this? Share you viewpoint on our Facebook page or Affiliate Interaction Zone.
