Google has announced this week that it is to implement a new ranking adjustment for its doorway page classifier in order to deal with doorway pages in search results more efficiently. Basically, Google doesn’t want doorway pages to be ranked and appear prominently in search results and this new algorithm is designed to move them down.
Doorway pages exist to give websites the maximum possible search footprint; this is done through the creation of both external pages on the internet or internal pages on a user’s own website. This can create multiple ranked web pages that appear in the search results, all pointing at the same landing page.
Google have moved to minimise the effect of this technique as they feel that companies employing it to maximise their search footprint are doing so without employing high-quality, unique content – something that it prizes above all else when it comes to ranking results.
Instead, these doorway campaigns present themselves as pages on a given site or, in some instances, as a collection of domains, elbowing their way past higher quality sites under the current search rules. The upcoming changes could have a significant impact on sites that use this technique regularly.
For those unsure whether their web pages qualify as doorways under Google’s new rules, the company has released a series of criteria to help you work it out. Below is a taster of the kind of questions they have put forward:
• Is the main purpose of these pages to gain high search engine rankings and get visitors into the parts of the website that can be used and navigated, or do they form a central part of the site’s user experience?
• Are these pages designed to rank for generic terms but populated with very specific content?
• Were these pages created with the sole intention of pulling in affiliate traffic and directing users along without the creation of unique content?
If you are satisfied with your answers to those questions, you can rest easy; if not, there may be some work ahead for you.
