In the wake of Google’s announcement that they will be penalising sites that are not mobile friendly, the company’s other recent announcement surrounding its doorway page update has been somewhat lost. However, it is certainly not something that you should be forgetting about, as being perceived as using a doorway campaign can result in a major ranking drop for your website.
Below are our top tips on making sure your site doesn’t fall foul of the update.
Remove any duplicate content
The need to remove duplicate content is not a new one – we’ve already seen Google not rank any content it considers to be duplicate – but it would appear that as part of the doorway update, the penalty could increase quite a bit further.
It is vital therefore that any content that is search focused only appears once across your site and all duplicate instances are removed. In cases where there is certain search focused duplicate content on your site that you need to remain for whatever reason, then you need to make use of no-follows and canonicals.
Avoid any empty pages
It has been the standard practice of some companies and developers when it comes to their websites to set pages live and then begin content creating them. Following the upcoming doorway update, however, that will become a potentially dangerous tactic as the new algorithm will take a dim view of empty pages and could hit you with a penalty. From now on your pages must be complete and fully populated before being pushed live.
Improve your site navigation
This is an important one for many websites and businesses, as the new Google alterations dictate that all pages designed to drive traffic are easily found by users on your site. Any pages that do focus on traffic driving in the search engine results, but are hidden away somewhat when it comes to navigating your site, could result in penalties that it would be hard to recover from.
Now is the time to make changes to your site to ensure that is easily navigable by the users that land on it and that all of your content is visible.
Hopefully these are rules of thumb that the majority of you will already be following, but if you don’t, now is the time to start!
