way pages: An SEO deep dive //

An admission is made: I created “doorway pages” once on a large scale.

This was many years before Google existed. It was also not spam back then.

Some marketers might find doorway pages difficult to understand. There has been confusion since Google declared that creating such pages is illegal.

These mixups can be just as bad as SEO cloaking. Continue reading to learn more about doorway pages, what they are, how to spot them and what you can do about them.

What are doorway pages?

Google defines doorways as:

“…sites are pages that rank for similar searches. They can lead users to intermediate pages which aren’t as useful as the final destination.

These are also examples of doorways:

* Multiple websites, with slightly different URLs and home pages to maximize reach for specific queries

* Multiple domain names and pages that are targeted at certain cities or regions. This funnels users to one page.

* Pages created to direct visitors to the relevant or usable portion of your website.

* Pages that are substantially similar to search results but not in a clear, navigable hierarchy

The beginning days of doorway pages

In the early days of search engines, doorway pages were a magical, mystical thing.

This is partly because, in the advent of the commercialized/public internet, everyone thought that website visitors would only enter your site via the homepage.

Visitors would enter the site through the “front door” and only then.

As search engines took in and reflected pages, it felt like you were at a Buddhist monk’s highest stage of enlightenment when you realized that a website could have many front doors through which visitors could enter.

When I created them in 1996/1997, I didn’t know what doorway pages were. Although search engines started out as curated directories of linked, once pages were being spidered, they changed quickly. One of Verizon’s largest websites was in need of more traffic.

The site’s homepage was not optimized for more than 8,000 business categories and nearly 19,000 cities. Each page should be optimized for ranking in business categories, cities or combinations of both.

Because the entire process felt almost magical, I called my pages “portals”. Optimizing pages and trying out different techniques was almost a ritual-like experience. I imagined that I could teleport people searching for “restaurants near springfield” or “doctors near bellevue” to our website, where they would find exactly what they were looking for.

Although there was no guide or formula to address these issues at scale, others have come up with similar solutions. They are looking to expand the content that matches growing numbers of search engine queries.

Although my “portal pages” skunkworks project was a success, it would take many years before the company leadership recognized its value and allowed me the freedom to implement the concept beyond my pilot research.

Search results have seen an increase in doorway pages

There was a lot of buzz about doorway pages when they were added to the spam list. Googlers put a heavy emphasis on the fact that doorways should be avoided.

In the years that followed, not as much has been written about this topic. Google seemed to be more circumspect in regards to the imposition penalties for the practice and other quality rules.

Some marketers believed that doorway pages were not worth the attention.

One common explanation is “Amazon does this, and Google SERPs full of Amazon, so …”

These people often use doorway pages to link to their websites.

In the past six years, there has been an increase in lawsuits against doorway pages. This was the first time I wrote about it in 2017. I wrote ” Initial interest Confusion rears its ugly heads once again in trademark infringement case” where I mentioned an older lawsuit in which Multi Time Machine sued Amazon because it hosted a search result page for “mtm Special ops watches” (and similar keyword searches that could have been related to the watch company’s mark).

Amazon hosted the page “MTM special operations watches”, but it only displayed search results for similar products.

Multi Time Machine claimed that this could confuse consumers who were expecting MTM products. This was therefore an infringement.

The court dismissed the suit because it was clear that no reasonable consumer would get confused by the Amazon page, which featured products significantly underpriced for MTM watches.

Another case, Bodum USA, Inc., v. Williams-Sonoma, Inc .”), French-press coffee maker manufacturer Bodum sued Williams-Sonoma’s former retail partner under similar circumstances.

Williams-Sonoma sold Bodum products briefly, but they eventually stopped selling them. Instead, they decided to make their own French press coffee machines.

The Bodum search results page was maintained on Williams-Sonoma.com, but it only presented Williams-Sonoma products, not Bodum’s.

The circumstances, including the accusations that the products were confusingly similar to each other, were undoubtedly more confusing than the Multi Time Machine/Amazon case.

Bodum and Williams-Sonoma were settled out of court. Williams-Sonoma added a disclaimer on their web results, “We don’t sell Bodum-branded products.”

I spoke to the CEO of another company, which had previously sold their products through Williams-Sonoma. The latter dropped the products in a similar fashion, started featuring their own products and maintained a search result page that used the brand name of the company.

Google has recently updated its Webmaster Guidelines and renamed them to Google Search Essentials . Google could easily have avoided this category, if they weren’t a concern.

Instead, the Spam Policies section page has been updated to promote Doorways as the second-listed contravened practise, right after Cloaking. Google added another example of Doorways.

Google’s view on doorway pages: An overview

Google’s 20-plus year history included doorway pages. I found references to doorway pages in Google’s rules back to June 2006 (though I believe there may have been an earlier rule).

In a session held at the 2007 SMX Advanced conference, Matt Cutts , Google’s former head for web spam was asked for more detailed guidelines.

A few days later, Vanessa Fox, a Google Webmaster Central blogger, announced that the guidelines had been expanded and included more examples.

The expanded text was.

Doorway pages are pages that are specifically designed for search engines. Many links, often hundreds of them, are found on doorway pages that are not useful to visitors and don’t contain any valuable content. HTML sitemaps can be a valuable resource to your visitors. However, ensure that your visitors are able to navigate these pages of links easily. You can organize links into categories, or multiple pages, if you have many. However, make sure they are designed for users to navigate your site and not just search engines.

2013 Google Webmaster Tools content guidelines section had changed this description.

“Doorway pages” are often a large number of low-quality pages that have been optimized for one keyword or phrase. Many times, doorway pages are designed to rank for one keyword or phrase and funnel users to a single destination. Doorway pages can be deployed on multiple domains or set up within one domain and frustrate users.

Google posted an article to the Google Search Central blog in 2015. This article highlighted what Google hated about doorway webpages and announced a “ranking adjustment”. It was a core update that would penalize them.

Sites have tried to increase their “search footprint”, but without adding any clear, distinctive value. These doorway campaigns can manifest as pages on a website, or as a collection of domains. We will soon launch a ranking adjustment in order to improve the quality search results for our users. This change could have a wide impact on sites with established doorway campaigns.

Doorway pages can be used to help users navigate between search engines’ results pages or the most detailed content on a website. These pages can be used to collect pages for individual websites pages, even if one has a small crawl budget.

However, they can cause a site’s index pages to be inflated by thousands or millions of pages. This could make it appear for more searches than it merits.

Jennifer Slegg’s analysis and announcement regarding the doorway pages rank adjustment was that it was likely to improve the quality of mobile search results.

Local business directories had attempted to index their websites for every combination of location and category. This was how my first doorway pages looked before anti-doorway rules were implemented. I worked at Verizon’s Superpages, which was one of the most popular online yellow pages.

However, it is possible to believe that Google gives some local directory sites a special treatment (as I will explain in the “Types of Doorway Pages” section below).

Barry Schwartz called the “adjustment,” a ” penalty algorithm.”

Many realized that Google’s guidelines were being violated when they received an automated penalty.

Although websites were penalized in the past for this, many people believed that their sites would be fine if they weren’t currently penalized.

As the doorway penalty was rolled out, this irrationally based belief was proved false.

Seven years later, many organic search marketers are younger and more aware that doorway pages can be a serious offense, just like they were in the past.

Sometimes, this can be due to an oversight. Sometimes, SEO marketers may be bolder and more ambitious in expanding indexable pages until they reach a certain point. Google will then detect doorway pages and hit them hard.

Although even having one doorway page is against Google’s rules it is not illegal. In reality, the scale of doorway page violations are determined by the number of people using them.

Although a small number of pages may not be problematic, it is more likely that a larger number than meatier pages will be noticed, leading to a negative outcome.

Different types of doorway pages

Spammy region/city pages

This is similar to Google’s example of having multiple domain names or pages that are targeted at certain regions or cities and which funnel users to a single page.

Imagine a New Hampshire law firm.

• Pages targeted at “[legal specialty] In [city name]” using all the same templates with only the city name being changed on each page.
• All pages direct users to a Contact Us page.

If it were done for all the New Hampshire towns, it would look very repetitive and spammy.

This could also be done in over 19,000 cities and towns throughout the United States.

It is possible that businesses in large metropolitan areas could be penalized for implementing this plan (i.e. targeting the approximately 88 cities in greater Los Angeles and the more than 200 cities within the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex). This is especially true if the company does not have a physical address to each city which would make it eligible for such pages.

This is an example page that a business directory uses to open doors.

Google’s algorithmic rules for defining spammy cities/regions of pages have some caveats.

You can search for local business listings on major directory websites such as Yelp or Yellow Pages right now. These pages will appear in the top search results when you combine business category keywords with local city names (e.g. “accountants poughkeepsie, NY”).

Neighborhoods.com and nextdoor.com have great success. It is unlikely that a page will be considered a gateway page if it does not contain valuable, high-quality information about the cities targeted by a website. This is an important criterion many people seem to overlook when assessing whether or not doorway pages are monitored by Google.

If you have a page called “Attorneys New York City” but it only contains links to listings for all boroughs, this page would be considered a doorway page.

A poor user experience would result if a user searches for “attorneys” in New York City and clicks on a page with no listings but only links to other pages.

However, if they click on the page to find listings of lawyers, it would not fit the model of a doorway page.

This can be understood by simply searching for “attorneys nyc” in Google.

Microsites

Although Google doesn’t refer to microsites in its guidelines, this tactic was once known.

Google’s current rule is that multiple websites can be created with slight variations of the URL and homepage to increase their reach for specific queries.

Microsites were more popularized when SEOs discovered that Google gave preference to websites that included the keyword in their domain names.

Imagine Target.com doing this. Based on their sitemaps file, they sell more than 3,000 products.

It would have been extremely annoying to create a subwebsite for each product, with links to the main website. This would be unnecessary as Google already shows their category pages in search results.

This idea is attractive for website owners who believe it will lead to success they didn’t achieve by optimizing their websites enough.

I’ve argued with CEOs about this exact thing before, telling them that you must market a microsite as well as your main website. Promote it, advertise it, and use social media with them. Don’t do it because nobody markets microsites adequately when they create dozens, hundreds or even thousands!

Although you can make a promotional website for just a few items, it is better to treat them as complete websites in order to rank well.

An unrelated, keyworded URL by itself is not sufficient. This is not an easy way to achieve high rankings across the board.

Indexable internal search results pages

Google has maintained for years that they don’t want to index websites’ search results pages. This is due to the fact that this could contain an infinite number of pages and all the keywords that could be used when a user searches on a website. Search-results-in-search-results is an irritating user experience.

This is the most confusing part of Google’s guidelines. There are several ways to define search results on websites.

Some websites display category pages or item listing pages using website/database search functionality.

Google’s SEO Starter Guide States:

Avoid: Allow Google to crawl your internal search results pages. Users don’t like clicking on a search engine result and landing on another page on your website.

There are some differences between indexing one’s category pages (of a limited amount and very specific) and having many variations indexed by category-type keywords that display substantially the same pages.

Ecommerce websites can be a good example of this. Marketers create category pages that include all product options. Ecatalog software frequently offers “faceted” navigation options that can produce such pages. Here’s one example:

• Micro SD Digital Cameras, $100 to $250, 9 megapixels or Less
• SD Digital Cameras, $100 to $250, 9 megapixels or Less
• Micro SD Digital Cameras, $250 to $500, 9 megapixels or Less
• SD Digital Cameras, $250 to $500, 9 megapixels or Less
• Micro SD Digital Cameras, $500 to $700. 9 or Less Megapixels
• SD Digital Cameras, $500 to $700, 9 megapixels or Less
• Micro SD Digital Cameras $100 – $250, 10 megapixels –
• SD Digital Cameras $100 – $250, 10 – 11 Megapixels
• Micro SD Digital Cameras 250 to $500, 10 to 11. Megapixels
• SD Digital Cameras 250 to $500, 10 to 11. Megapixels
• Micro SD Digital Cameras 500 to $700, 10 to 11.
• SD Digital Cameras 500 to $700, 10-11 Megapixels

Some websites may be able create such pages with a wide variety of content that they don’t need to submit to a page assessment.

However, many websites might display almost identical content or only one product listing. It would be better to have the product page itself index.

Some websites also have the unfortunate feature of automatically producing indexable search results pages when users conduct queries on their sites.

This could lead to a lot of pages being indexed that only have the keyword name changed, but the content of those pages is substantially or completely similar to other pages on the site.

This holds true for Williams-Sonoma pages, where an indexed search for “bodum coffeemakers” may yield the same content as a category page for “French presse coffee makers”.

It is even more worrying that pages generated blindly from search results can contain keywords that are not relevant to the website. This is spam, or, to put it another way, trademark infringement.

One lawsuit that I was involved in was where an online retailer allowed thousands to thousands of pages from users’ search queries to be indexed. This included major brands such as Gucci, Versace and Chanel.

A greater number of pages were also indexed from the site, focusing on keywords phrases that produce substantially similar results to search results pages.

• “white jeans”
• “white jean”
• “size 17 jeans”
• “jeans size 17”
• “black jeans”
• “black rip jeans”
• “black rips jeans”
• “black ripped jeans”
• “black ripped jean”
• “Ripped black jeans”
• “black jeans men”
• “black jeans mens”

These keyword phrases can be multiplied hundreds to thousands of times, so you get the idea. Duplicate content on a large scale and spammy.

Indexed internal search results can be generated for any website that has substantial content and search functionality.

A client of mine in 2007/2008 was involved with creating a curated search results page that was de-indexed by Google within minutes after this rule was implemented.

Keyword variations propagate substantial duplicate content

This is how it could work as an example. Pages were indexed by an online retailer using multiple keywords. The pages would contain identical content.

It is possible that there may be some plausible denial when SEO software combined with Shopify or another online shopping software can result more user-generated searches being indexed as pages.

Some websites, however, have attempted to programmatically create alternative versions of their content pages by using synonyms, keyword search APIs, AI or human editors. Multiple pages could publish the page’s content, each with a title and headline that includes different keywords.

This is something that many websites with thin content have done in the past. It probably doesn’t work in Google these days.

Unsure? Unsure?

Google may “discredit” your website for having doorway pages. You should delete any doorway pages you know about and instead focus on quality and promotion of your other content pages.

You can find some suggestions and guidance here if you’re unsure whether you have what Google considers doorway pages.

Amazon has been accused of allowing doorway pages to be displayed because they have lots PageRank. Google shows many of Amazon’s doorsway pages, where other websites wouldn’t.

Amazon has 135 million pages indexed, and ranks for top product names queries across the board. Google can and does take the position that users should be provided with the information they need first and foremost.

Google may allow for infractions to be allowed if the site is expected to appear in search results. This will keep the page visible in search results so that consumers can find it. Google does not like doorway pages.

However, I don’t think Amazon’s pages can be considered doorways.

In general, clicking on an Amazon listing in Google’s product search results will lead you to the product you want. These can be specific product pages or category listings pages.

You can see photos of what you want, which is usually quite satisfactory. This is an important determinant.

Doorway pages are usually:

• This is a sort of interstitial between Google search results and the destination pages that users are actually looking for.
• Multiple duplicates of the same keywords.
• Spammed keyword combinations that have little to do with what the user is looking for.

It is not true that Amazon gets away with Doorway Pages. It is clear that Amazon provides searchers with a satisfying experience by fulfilling their promise of keyword targeting on their pages.

These are some tips to reduce the risk of a “ding” at your doorway.

Just remove the doorways from your index

Google suggests robots.txt but I have a different take.

SEO is more effective if there is a strong internal link hierarchy. This can help Google find and index the site’s specific content.

To avoid the pages being crawled, it is a good idea to add a robots tag to the pages that have a “noindex”, along with the “follow,” directive.

Restrict internal search to generating pages

You can use your website search data to identify keywords your users might be using to find your content.

It is important to use this guideline for creating new content or modifying existing content.

However, you should not allow your internal searches to automatically convert into pages of search results search engines can index.

Doing so will put your site squarely on an increasing curve of cookie-cutter-templated pages that will generate levels of duplication, pages with low value, and open you up to possible spam-hacking exploits.

Human-curating pages should be done to stop uncontrolled pages being added to your site when users enter word combinations into search forms.

Tech modifications should be considered if your internal search URLs can be indexed. This is because users often share URLs with each other. You may end up with a lot of external links that users have created over time.

You might need to either set all robot meta tags with noindex directives, or allow them in robots.txt.

Alternatively, you could switch the search functionality to only work with the POST method, revoking the ability for full URLs to be bookmarkable/indexable.

Make your category pages richer by redesigning

Pages for subcategories and category pages don’t have to be merely navigational lists with links to deeper pages. It is possible to display the top items in the category on the page as well as navigational links deeper.

You can include informational text, preview snippets, and links to related blogs posts. Highlight the most recent items, updated content, top-sellers or endorsement blurbs.

You want to convert what were essentially links pages for search engines into pages that can be used by end users.

Improve the relevance of core content pages to other keywords

You are only using one SEO technique if you use doorway pages to create content that is relevant to many keyword phrases.

If you are careful about adding keywords phrases to the page, instead of making doorways, it is possible to add a few more keyword phrases. Don’t overdo it or you could be penalized by Google for keyword stuffing.

You can also create links that point to the main page of a topic using alternative keyword phrases. Avoid creating too many links and don’t resort to external link-building to build them.

Articles or posts could be written on your website to link alternate keywords back to the main topic page.

Get rid of doorway pages

Since around two decades ago, doorway pages have been considered a contravened practice.

Google’s Search Essentials update has increased the prominence for doorway pages under the section on contravened spam policies. They added an example to the long-present list.

This shows that doorway pages are still considered to be a bad practice. It is just as serious as other black hat SEO techniques that are dangerous, wrong and unethical. Google would have taken the opportunity to update the section and revoke the guidelines for doorway pages.

Although there has been some rationalization and confusion from the search community, the practice of using doorway pages will not change.

It can penalize your website or a part of it, causing the pages to be buried in search results far down and/or de-indexed completely so they are not found by any search.

Alternate optimizations may be able to provide perceived benefits for doorway pages, and can reduce or eliminate the conditions that could cause them.

Keep up with current SEO best practices and avoid getting involved with doorway pages. Your organic search ranking program will grow without you having to worry about Google’s negative side.

There are additional benefits to managing doorway pages by eliminating them. This will help you avoid any potential legal liability.

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