How Google's Doorway Pages Update Affects Local SEO
-
Hey Awesome Local Folks!
I thought I'd take a proactive stance and start a thread on the new doorway pages update from Google, as I feel there will be questions coming up about this here in the forum:
Here's the update announcement:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html
And here's the part that will make local business owners and Local SEOs take a second glance at this:
Here are questions to ask of pages that could be seen as doorway pages:
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?
I think this will naturally lead to questions about the practice of creating local/city landing pages. At this point, my prediction is that this will come down to high quality vs. crummy quality pages of this type. In fact, after chatting briefly with Andrew Shotland, I'm leaning a bit toward seeing the above language as being strongly geared toward directory type sites and large franchises. I recommend reading Andrew's post about his take on this, as I think he's on the right track:
http://www.localseoguide.com/googles-about-to-close-your-local-doorway-pages/
So, I'm feeling at this point that if you've made the right efforts to develop unique, high quality local landing pages, you should be good unless you are an accidental casualty of an over-zealous update. We'll see! If anyone has thoughts to contribute on this thread, I hope they will, and if lots of questions start coming up about this here in the community, feel free to link back to this thread in helping your fellow community members Thanks, all!
-
Hi Blake,
What I'm suggesting with those links is that you need to do a thorough analysis of any competitor to discover whether their high rankings are a case of geography, organic strength, reviews, citations and a host of other factors ... or, if the pack in question has been spammed. If the former, you then know what the factors are that are contributing to rank and can identify which factors (if any) you can target to surpass the competitor. If the latter, then you can always report spam to Google. There are believed to be several hundred factors that contribute to rank, and a Local SEO or local business owner who is feeling astonishment over being outranked by what appears to be a weak competitor needs to sit down and put the time in to discover whether these high rankings are the result of strength that Google is responding to, or the result of spam that Google is failing to catch.
In the scope of a forum, it's not likely that a community member is going to be able to take the time to do a full competitive analysis for you, so I'm hoping the links I've provided will get you started on doing one. I totally get how frustrating it can be to find your business or your client's business in this scenario of being outranked, but fortunately, we can use skill to divine the probable cause of this outcome and, hopefully, figure out how to overcome any issues, whenever possible.
Hope this helps!
-
Although confusing, I appreciate the shared links to the threads. It's still not clear to me why google ranks the site I shared #1! in a highly competitive keyword. It's the same keyword in endless local cities but with that city in the title next to it. Does google still see those titles are technically different? So google doesn't recognize www.url.com/keyword-city#1 and www.url.com/keyword-city#2 as penalty worthy? Seems unfair to those taking time to make sure there are no keyword titles used more than once on a large site. OH AND...the content on these endless "city" pages have the EXACT same content on each one but the city in 3 or 4 different areas is switched out.
-
Hi Blake,
These 2 threads may help you diagnose competitors' rankings:
https://moz.com/community/q/do-you-know-what-s-triggering-your-local-packs
https://moz.com/community/q/top-local-organic-rankings-but-nowhere-to-be-found-on-google-snack-pack
Hope these help!
-
I'm super focused on creating non-duplicate content and creating blogs with killer info-graphics but I have a business I help where I created 10 specific city landing pages within the main site with great original content. Then I come across this site seasonsviewwindowanddoor.com and think, are you serious? How is this legal and it ranks high in any city search I do. Of course this conflicts my thinking about what to do. Any of your two cents is greatly appreciated
-
You're very welcome!
-
Thanks Miriam
-
Hi Joanna,
Yes - I would still recommend creating a unique page on your site for each location out of which you operate, and making maximum effort to ensure that the content on each page is unique and helpful.
-
Miriam,
Thanks for jumping on this - very helpful to see some info already being aggregated and questions answered. I know I'm a little late to the party, but it sounds to me like you'd still recommend that businesses (such as a bank, clothing retailer, etc.) that have one business but locations in multiple cities and/or states, create location specific landing pages that match up with individual google+ business pages?
Obviously, each page has elements like a unique description and service set list as appropriate, unique hours/timezone, potentially customer reviews, unique driving directions from major areas, etc. Essentially - true content users would be looking at.
My understanding is this is still the "best practice" path for ranking in local pack and/or queries that drive location-specfic serps. Accurate?
Thanks again!
-
Thanks Miriam!
-
Hey Rod,
This is Google's def. of Doorway Pages: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721311
If you read through that carefully, I think the conclusion you may draw is that the difference between what Google is describing as a doorway page and what you may hear Local SEOs referring to as 'local landing pages' or 'city landing pages' or what have you, would be uniqueness and quality. This is my reading of this, anyway.
If you are going to create landing pages, as in the case of a local business serving multiple cities, I would suggest making maximum effort to ensure that each page is a thorough, unique, stand-alone resource for visitors. Don't throw up a bunch of thin, similar pages. Go for uniqueness and high quality. Hope this helps.
-
I'd like to hear the differences between doorway pages and landing pages. I see Google utilizing multiple local landing pages, so if we follow creating pages similar to this we should be fine?
-
Hey Rod,
I'm trying to understand what this service does. I looked up a random business in it and it simply seems to be giving a sense of how the business is listed on Google. I'm not seeing actual landing pages. Is there something particular that you are looking at on this site that concerns you in regards to doorway pages?
-
Google updated - now it goes to city/town: https://www.gybo.com/pa/norristown (after you put in your town)
So I'm thinking this is in line with what we currently do for town landing pages.
-
Hmm... that link is redirecting me to a homepage.
-
What are your thoughts if local landing pages are created similar to the gybo.com pages?
http://www.gybo.com/pennsylvania/ is one example (my state) - thanks for the link Miriam!
-
Thanks for sharing Miriam!
-
Hey Rod,
While there hasn't really been any more news that I'm aware of on this, you might like to check out the thread on Linda Buquet's forum, which has some additional discussion and some other links in it, for further reading:
-
Any updates on this topic? Thanks!
-
That's great, Linda! I bet you'll be getting stories from your community about things they see happening with this. Really glad you'll be covering it.
-
Hi Adam,
Good comment! I'm also thinking about the multi-site scenario - particularly the multi-mini-site scenario. I've never been a fan of this approach and it does seem like the update could be applied to this scenario. Not sure yet ... but could be.
-
Agree with you, Ryan, that creativity is so key. One thing I have long stressed to my own clients is that owning a website = having become a publisher. You want to publish great stuff - not junk.
-
Thanks Miriam, we've been discussing in the G+ Pro community all day and I'm working on a forum post for tomorrow. I have Andrew's post in there and I'll include a link to your post here as well.
-
Hi Miriam
The other aspect of this that got me thinking when I saw the update was around multiple sites for the same business. I have seen this in several niches where the same business has 2 or 3 different websites ranking on page 1 for their main term. Each of these sites has unique content etc however they are all linked via the same address. I have been waiting for Google to resolve this issue as it is technically a doorway page unique just more sophisticated. It wouldn't be hard for them to devalue a site if they see it ranking well and it is the same business as another site ranking.
I wonder if they will deal with this issue in this update.
-
Great update Miriam. There are a lot of things site owners can add to these types of pages to help with unique content: drive time to the nearest branch from City / Neightborhood X; mobile service schedules in City / Neighborhood X; Images of service radius; highly localized testimonials, etc. Will be interesting to see the impact with franchisees..
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
-
I have followed all the steps in google speed ranking on how to increase my website http://briefwatch.com/ speed but no good result
My website http://briefwatch.com/ has a very low-speed score on google page speed and I followed all the steps given to me still my website speed doesn't increase
Local Website Optimization | | Briefwatch0 -
International SEO: reposting my own posts to different ccTLDs versions of my website
Hello there Moz community! Moz has been super helpful for me and the team, keep up the good work! I have searched online for answers regarding my specific situation, but I haven't found any. I'm asking my fellow Moz users in hopes of an answer. Maybe this thread will help others too. I currently have this domain: https://eco-reusable.com/ I would like to target Ireland and the UK with my keywords so I have just bought eco-reusable**.IE** and eco-reusable**.CO.UK** My questions are: 1. In order to rank as high as possible for Ireland, do I create a new website for eco-reusable.ie using the same pages but changing all the content slightly so it is not duplicate content OR do I point the eco-reusable.ie domain to eco-reusable.com? By having two sites, we will add more hours but we don't mind if that will be of benefit in the longrun for ranking high in Ireland. I have the same question for eco-reusable.co.uk
Local Website Optimization | | Gael_Regnault
If we have to create three websites and make similar content (not duplicate), we will if it will be better for ranking high in ireland for .ie, in the UK for .co.uk and for the rest of the world for .com 2. If we create three websites, can I safely "copy/paste" my blog posts without being punished by Google for duplicate content? If so, how much variation do we have to have for each of the three sites if we are writing blogs that are the same context. Thank you in advance! 🙂0 -
Subdomain vs. Separate Domain for SEO & Google AdWords
We have a client who carries 4 product lines from different manufacturers under a singular domain name (www.companyname.com), and last fall, one of their manufacturers indicated that they needed to move to separate out one of those product lines from the rest, so we redesigned and relaunched as two separate sites - www.companyname.com and www.companynameseparateproduct.com (a newly-purchased domain). Since that time, their manufacturer has reneged their requirement to separate the product lines, but the client has been running both sites separately since they launched at the beginning of December 2016. Since that time, they have cannibalized their content strategy (effective February 2017) and hacked apart their PPC budget from both sites (effective April 2017), and are upset that their organic and paid traffic has correspondingly dropped from the original domain, and that the new domain hasn't continued to grow at the rate they would like it to (we did warn them, and they made the decision to move forward with the changes anyway). This past week, they decided to hire an in-house marketing manager, who is insisting that we move the newer domain (www.companynameseparateproduct.com) to become a subdomain on their original site (separateproduct.companyname.com). Our team has argued that making this change back 6 months into the life of the new site will hurt their SEO (especially if we have to 301 redirect all of the old content back again, without any new content regularly being added), which was corroborated with this article. We'd also have to kill the separate AdWords account and quality score associated with the ads in that account to move them back. We're currently looking for any extra insight or literature that we might be able to find that helps explain this to the client better - even if it is a little technical. (We're also open to finding out if this method of thinking is incorrect if things have changed!)
Local Website Optimization | | mkbeesto0 -
Looking for SEO advice
Hi, I have a website that has been built with SEO in mind from the beginning but it's failing to rank at all. We have checked everything and found nothing we see that would be negatively affected the SEO value. The link is http://www.fancydoorsedmonton.com/ Any insight on anything you may find would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | Web3Marketing870 -
How can I migrate a website's content to a new WP theme, delete the old site, and avoid duplication and other issues?
Hey everyone. I recently took on a side project managing a family member's website (www.donaldtlevinemd.com). I don't want to get too into it, but my relative was roped into two shady digital marketing firms that did nothing but a mix of black-hat SEO (and nothing at all). His site currently runs off a custom wordpress theme which is incompatible with important plugins I want to use for local optimization. I'm also unable to implement responsive design for mobile. The silver lining is that these previous "content marketers" did no legitimate link building (I'm auditing the link profile now) so I feel comfortable starting fresh. I'm just not technical enough to understand how to go about migrating his domain to a new theme (or creating a new domain altogether). All advice is appreciated! Thanks for your help!
Local Website Optimization | | jampaper1 -
Nominet have made the geographic new TLD available for UK. How will this affect SEO?
Nominet have made a new TLD available, the .uk TLD. Some might argue that this is a cynical move by Nominet to get more money out of British businesses, but either way, we need to decide how we handle this. As I see it we have 4 options. 1. Do nothing - At the moment, only websites can register their .uk domain. That won't last for ever though, and eventually, if we don't register it, someone else will.
Local Website Optimization | | Stewart_SEO
2. Register a domain but do nothing with it.
3. Register a domain and simply redirect it to the existing .co.uk domain. I suspect this is the best option.
4. Register the .uk domain and redirect the .co.uk domain to the new domain. From a technical point of view, what is the best option? For businesses that have multi-lingual sites the 4th appears the best option but why do we need to act when we do not even know the SEO value of any of this, and where Google sit regarding the new British TLD?1 -
Is it possible to target a keyword which is english but targeted to google.com.tr user
Hey I want to know, is it possible to target a keyword which is english, but target market .com.tr For that purpose must we take backlink from site written english but target to turkish ?
Local Website Optimization | | atakala
Or site written english but target to anywhere? I know this question is a bit confusing but my boss want me to that.0 -
If I mention a client in a blogpost about SEO, do I have to use a rel= no follow link?
I do SEO and webstuff (obviously, that's why I'm here). I want to write a blog post congratulating my client for getting to #1 in the local listings for a search for "plumber". When I include my link to my client's site, should it be rel=no follow? Could they be penalized if I don't? Thanks,
Local Website Optimization | | aj613
Adam0