Are Hotel Vanity Websites considered a Doorway Page to brand.com?
-
I work for a large 3rd party management company and we use vanity websites to help us market our hotels. They provide us the ability to better manage our content as well as provide value to our customers versus the brand site. An example would be Vanity: http://www.hiltonmonterey.com/Brand.com: http://hiltongardeninn3.hilton.com/en/hotels/california/hilton-garden-inn-monterey-MRYMHGI/index.htmlBased on my reading of Google's guidelines I am concerned that our vanity site may be interpreted as such. Please advise if this is the case.
-
Hi John
Nobody but Google can tell you for sure - but if I compare both pages & check the guidelines here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html the site doesn't look like a typical doorway page:
1.Is the purpose to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site, or are they an integral part of your site’s user experience?
=> the user experience on the vanity url is better than the standard page on the Hilton side. The only moment when you lead your visitors to the main site is when they want to book2.Are the pages intended to rank on generic terms yet the content presented on the page is very specific? You're site seems optimised for people searching for this specific hotel - not hotels in general or any other generic terms
3. 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?
You don't exactly duplicate - you enrich the content in order to offer your visitors (and not the search engines) a better experience.4. Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic and sending users along without creating unique value in content or functionality?
This point is definitely not the case5. Do these pages exist as an “island?” Are they difficult or impossible to navigate to from other parts of your site? Are links to such pages from other pages within the site or network of sites created just for search engines?
Yes it is an island - but in that case you could see any hotel site as doorway page for a site like Booking.com when they use the Booking search engine.To be honest, I would not be too worried. The goal of this update to eliminate pages will low added value, that only exist to rank & to funnel visitors to the main site. The example you gave has a high added value, and you're not funnelling to the main site (apart for booking purposes).
Hope this helps,
Dirk
-
If a "vanity" web site is high quality, offers unique content, and that content is relevant to the specific search queries most accurate to the content provided on that site, it's a perfectly valid site.
If a multi-site environment was designed to have one company/business dominate search results for individual search phrases and if any of those sites created for that purpose are not unique enough but artificially designed to trick ranking domination, that's going to be a problem.
So that's the question - how high is the quality? how unique is the content? How helpful is the "vanity" 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
-
FAQ page structure
I have read in other discussions that having all questions on an FAQ page is the way to go and then if the question has an answer worthy of its own page, you should abbreviate the answer and link to the page with more content. My question is when using some templates in WP, they have a little + button you can click and it reveal the answer to the question. Does this hurt SEO versus having all text visible and then using headers/subheaders? An example of the + button https://fyrfyret.dk/faq/
On-Page Optimization | | OrlandSEO1 -
If I put 'keyword/url' combination to 'stop run weekly', will it dissapear from the summary page in the on-page grader?
The summary page of the on-page grader chooses the keyword and url combination itself. Now if I choose another combination, I would like the former to dissapear from the summary page. The only option is 'stop running weekly'. But will it disappear from the list also?
On-Page Optimization | | jongeneelbv0 -
Why Is this Website Not Ranking?
HI There - I have been working on this site: http://limohireauckland.co.nz - primarily for our keyword phrase 'limo hire Auckland' - I am running a campaign for this site from the Pro tools and using the pon-page report card this url achieves an A grade for that particular phrase. The client is working on links in the local community etc but we are not appearing in the SERPS at all for most of the phrases we are optimising for. There has recently been a huge redesign on the site (approx 6 weeks ago) and the old content was not great. Am I missing something really glaringly obvious? Or am I being too impatient?
On-Page Optimization | | AllieMc0 -
Search Pages outranking Product Pages
A lot of the results seen in the search engines for our site are pages from our search results on our site, i.e. Widgets | Search Results This has happened over time and wasn't intentional, but in many cases we see our search results pages appearing over our actual product pages in search, which isn't ideal. Simply blocking indexing of these pages via robots wouldn't be ideal, at least all at once as we would have that period of time where those Search Results pages would be offline and our product pages would still be at the back of ranking. Any ideas on a strategy to replace these Search Results with the actual products in a way that won't hurt us too bad during the transition? Or a way to make the actual product pages rank above the search results? Currently, it is often the opposite. Thanks! Craig
On-Page Optimization | | TheCraig0 -
Home page keyword effecting internal page ranking
Hello, My client has a second keyword for the home page that is competitive. The home page is not being ranked for this keyword. Instead, an internal category page is ranking. This internal category page is more relevant than the home page - it shows the categories for the actual products that this term refers to. But everyone around us in Google's page results has far more backlinks than the internal page, and we're all heavily optimized for this term. My question is, is it safe to pull the second term off of the home page or is this internal page strong because it is somehow being strengthened by the home page optimization?
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
On-page: Over optimized images?
Hello guys. I have a small question about an on-page optimization for images. What I have: good title tag / good url structure good content (NOT keyword shuffled, its real content, for real people) images / gallery uploaded to folder named same as article name. For example: Great tips for bloggers [article name], great-tips-for-bloggers [folder name]. So my question is: Will Google harm me for this "too good" paths to images, article related image filenames, with mask like [gtips-img01], and if all images have titles / alt tags? Thank you guys.
On-Page Optimization | | infoo130 -
Too many On-Page Links on a WP based Website
Hi, I've already browsed through various of the Q&As on the "too many On-Page links" issue, but I would really need some advice concerning a WP Site with a dropdown navigation. As outlined in the on-page report, every site has about 180 outgoing links, which pretty much is the number of site featured in the navigation. Even though the 100 link limit is somewhat outdated I'm still worried about the distribution of linkjuice from the starting page and how Google perceives the importance of the various pages. Would it make sense to adapt the structure of the navigation, so that the starting page only links to the 5 category pages and the category pages only link to the detail pages they contain? The site has good rankings for several pages and I assume that Google can tell that the large number of links is caused by the navigation. But with every page having appr. 180 links it may be difficult for Google to tell, which of those pages are the most important regarding internal link structure... Looking foward to your opinion and insights! Cheers, Chris
On-Page Optimization | | adwordize0 -
Page title structure?
From an SEO and user perspective what structure do you recommend for page titles. For example (given that they shouldn't ideally be more than 70 characters) :- Keywords (maybe two or three) | Company Name | more keywords I understood the best place for the company name was about second place. Is this now the considered view taking into consideration 'branding' which has been flagged up as the way forward. Keywords are separated by the vertical bar | - any thoughts? For 'house keeping' pages such as Privacy Policy - should this be optmised or simply stated as 'privacy policy' Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | PH2920