Landing Page or Doorway ?- that is the question!
-
Hi Guys,
So, I'm looking at a project to build a series of landing pages that cross map cities with Suname. E.g. Sydney + Smyth, New York + Fitzpatrick. On those pages I'll pull in from our directory relevant name based listings and try and display some other tailored / information. The page itself is the end goal - it is definitely not a doorway in the classic sense of encouraging someone to then go on the main site. I want the user to fill out a form on this page because they realise they've landed on a valuable service.
I'm looking at potentially 500 names against 2000 locations, creating 1,000,000 landing pages. Although some of the content will be repetitive I genuinely believe someone doing the appropriate search and finding our page will derive value from our page as our whole business is designed to answer their needs. However I'm worried that Google may classify these pages as doorway pages. Could anyone please shine the light of experience on this for me?
Thanks!
-
Thanks EGOL. Good practial advice! I'll take it into consideration. I guess I just reckon that this approach will cover the long tail to a marginal extent and I can ramp up my efforts in a more hands on way for the main traffic searches.
-
I used to have some big sites made with databases. The challenge with sites of 100,000 pages or 1,000,000 pages is having enough PR to get then into the index and hold them in the index.
If you have a big site you need to have a regular flow of spiders into and out of every page or google will forget them and they will fall out of the index. Even if they stay in the index they will be poorly competitive.
One of my sites had about 150,000 pages and to get and hold it in the index took a lot of links. Today I bet that you would need at least 30 PR5 links that connected deeply into the site to maintain an adequate flow of spiders for healthy indexing for a site of that size. A site with a million pages is going to require a lot more.
So, in addition to creating this site you are going to need some powerful link sources for indexing.
-
Hi EGOL,
Thanks for the swift response. That makes a lot of sense and correlates to how I thought Google approached this issue. I guess I want to just suck it and see if Google will de-index the pages - I am aware that there will not be vastly unique content on all of them but on a steadily increasing percentage. What I am very worried about is being permanently punished if they feel I'm doing something very wrong, or having my entire site downgraded (as I have heard can happen for doorway pages) or having those pages with poor content not be reindexable in 4 months time when there is better content on them.
Do you have any thoughts on these concerns.
Thanks
-
Google crawlers are unable to determine if you are offering a "valuable service".
However, if you have a program crank out a million pages that all look like this.....
"yada yada yada LOCATION yada yada yada SURNAME yada yada yada yada"
"yada yada yada LOCATION yada yada yada SURNAME yada yada yada yada"
"yada yada yada LOCATION yada yada yada SURNAME yada yada yada yada"
.... Google will probably index them and display them in the SERPs for a few days.... (and you might make a little money)... but then you will see the number of pages in their index decline rapidly as they figure out that these are cookiie-cutter-pages and toss them out as duplicate content.
However, if you have the resources to write a million pages of absolutely unique, non-duplicating content then you might make a lot of money from this site.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Moz spam score 16 for some pages - Never a manual penalty: Disavow needed?
Hi community, We have some top hierarchy pages with spam score 16 as per Moz due to the backlinks with very high spam score. I read that we could ignore as long as we are not employing paid links or never got a manual penalty. Still we wanna give a try by disavowing certain domains to check if this helps. Anyway we are not going to loose any backlink score by rejecting this low-quality backlinks. Can we proceed? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Back links to pages on our site that don't exist on forums we haven't used with irrelevant product anchor text
Hi, I have a recurring issue that I can't find a reason for. I have a website that has over 7k backlinks that I monitor quite closely. Each month there are additional links on third party forums that have no relevance to the site or subject matter that are as a result toxic. Our clients site is a training site yet these links are appearing on third party sites like http://das-forum-der-musik.de/mineforum/ and have anchor text with "UGG boots for sale" to pages on our url listed as /mensuggboots.html that obviously don't exist. Each month, I try to contact the site owners and then I add them to Google using the disavow tool. Two months later they are gone and then are replaced with new backlinks on a number of different forum websites. Quite random but always relating to UGG boots. There are at least 100 extra links each month. Can anyone suggest why this is happening? Has anyone seen this kind of activity before? Is it possibly black hat SEO being performed by a competitor? I just don't understand why our URL is listed. To be fair, there are other websites linked to using the same terms that aren't ours and are also of a different theme so I don't understand what the "spammer" is trying to achieve. Any help would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rufo
KInd Regards
Steve0 -
Backlink Question
I have a backlink on a very popular sports news site PR5 this is a sitewide link. The link is near the top on righthand side. As you scroll down, the page keeps loading more and more information. According to my Google webmaster tools the link is on the site over 21,400 pages. As the stories being submitted are new most of the pages have no PR however there are around 30-40 categories that have PR ranging from 0-4. According to my AHREFS account on a daily basis it picks up between 100-200 new links with on average around 10-20 being lost as the stories are being removed. Would anyone advise I just ask for my link to be on the category pages only or should I leave it as it is? Many Thanks in Advance for any Feedback.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Palmbourne0 -
Does Google crawl and index dynamic pages?
I've linked a category page(static) to my homepage and linked a product page (dynamic page) to the category page. I tried to crawl my website using my homepage URL with the help of Screamingfrog while using Google Bot 2.1 as the user agent. Based on the results, it can crawl the product page which is a dynamic. Here's a sample product page which is a dynamic page(we're using product IDs instead of keyword-rich URLs for consistency):http://domain.com/AB1234567 Here's a sample category page: http://domain.com/city/area Here's my full question, does the spider result (from Screamingfrog) means Google will properly crawl and index the property pages though they are dynamic?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
Will blank category pages automatically get updated
Hello, We've got old category pages that are blank like domain/shoes.html (blank white page not in menu anymore) domain/newshoesurl.html (working URL with link in menu) Will the blank pages be automatically deindexed and updated by Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Question Regarding Keyword
Hi All, I am currently working on a travel site. Would for example Boutique Hotels in New York | Luxury Hotels in New York be considered keyword stuffing?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | appnyc0 -
Is domain name or page title "safe" as anchor text?
I am aware of the dangers of excessively optimized anchor text I have seen some suggestions that as long as your anchor text is either the URL or the page title that this will be OK, no matter how many links come in with that anchor text. Does anyone have an opinion, or even any hard data on this? Thx Paul
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | diogenes0 -
User comments with page content or as a separate page?
With the latest Google updates in both cracking down on useless pages and concentrating on high quality content, would it be beneficial to include user posted comments on the same page as the content or a separate page? Having a separate page with enough comments on it would he worth warranting, especially as extra pages add extra pagerank but would it be better to include them with the original article/post? Your ideas and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Peter2640