Would the same template landing page (placed on 50+ targeted domains) help or hurt my ranking?
-
Scenario: Company ABC has 50 related domains that are being forwarding to the main company URL.
Q1: Would there be SEO value by creating a template landing page for each domain that includes product info, photos and keyword links to the main URL?
Q2: If all 50+ landing pages were the same, would that penalize the main site due to duplicate content?
-
I would them expire and spend the money savings on beer.
And, spend the time savings improving my main website.
-
Thanks so much for your responses. I was just wondering if there are any acceptable methods for using these URL's to create value. But from the Google article, it looks like they are frowned upon. Good to know.
-
Exactly, a good answer from Ryan there. Best to avoid doing this type of SEO in any shape or form.
-
Hi Brian
As tempting as it may be, this would run a high risk of being classed as Domain Spamming, by creating Doorway Pages that link through to the real website for the purposes of trying to manipulate natural search rankings.
At best there would be some short-term SEO benefits, it's not considered to be ethical SEO though and chances are it would end up back-firing in the medium term, doesn't take that long these days for the main search engines to notice this kind of practice and to apply penalities.
Best bet is to spend the time creating valuable unique content and to distribute it well & obtain high quality natural links that way.
Hope that helps,
Regards
Simon
-
The process you are describing is doorway pages. Google penalizes doorway pages and you will certainly be discovered.
Doorway pages can easily be discovered simply by the fact you all link to the same site. Using the same template, common IP address, common registration information, etc are all other possibilities as well.
Your issues are not duplicate content nor varying the template, it is a clearly black hat technique which will lead to a penalty on your 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
-
Massive Spam attack against my domain - automate disvow of tld?
We've been getting hundreds of new links from unique domains every day - all the domains follow a pattern like this: www.someword-1f4163e1.space/wiki/Someterm Hundreds... every day. What techniques exist to deal with a prolonged negative seo attack of this type. By the time we can detect and disvow, the damage is done.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sonar0 -
SEO Template Recommendations - example provided but would welcome any advice
Hi there, I'm trying to improve the templates used on our website for SEO pages aimed at popular search terms. An example of our current page template is as follows: http://www.eteach.com/teaching-jobs Our designers have come up with the following new template: http://www.eteach.com/justindaviesnovemeber I know that changing successful pages can be risky. One concern is putting links behind JQuery, where the 'More on Surrey' link is. Does anyone had any strong suggestions or observations around our new template? Especially through the eyes of Google! Thanks in advance Justin
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
How to re-rank an established website with new content
I can't help but feel this is a somewhat untapped resource with a distinct lack of information.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ChimplyWebGroup
There is a massive amount of information around on how to rank a new website, or techniques in order to increase SEO effectiveness, but to rank a whole new set of pages or indeed to 're-build' a site that may have suffered an algorithmic penalty is a harder nut to crack in terms of information and resources. To start I'll provide my situation; SuperTED is an entertainment directory SEO project.
It seems likely we may have suffered an algorithmic penalty at some point around Penguin 2.0 (May 22nd) as traffic dropped steadily since then, but wasn't too aggressive really. Then to coincide with the newest Panda 27 (According to Moz) in late September this year we decided it was time to re-assess tactics to keep in line with Google's guidelines over the two years. We've slowly built a natural link-profile over this time but it's likely thin content was also an issue. So beginning of September up to end of October we took these steps; Contacted webmasters (and unfortunately there was some 'paid' link-building before I arrived) to remove links 'Disavowed' the rest of the unnatural links that we couldn't have removed manually. Worked on pagespeed as per Google guidelines until we received high-scores in the majority of 'speed testing' tools (e.g WebPageTest) Redesigned the entire site with speed, simplicity and accessibility in mind. Htaccessed 'fancy' URLs to remove file extensions and simplify the link structure. Completely removed two or three pages that were quite clearly just trying to 'trick' Google. Think a large page of links that simply said 'Entertainers in London', 'Entertainers in Scotland', etc. 404'ed, asked for URL removal via WMT, thinking of 410'ing? Added new content and pages that seem to follow Google's guidelines as far as I can tell, e.g;
Main Category Page Sub-category Pages Started to build new links to our now 'content-driven' pages naturally by asking our members to link to us via their personal profiles. We offered a reward system internally for this so we've seen a fairly good turnout. Many other 'possible' ranking factors; such as adding Schema data, optimising for mobile devices as best we can, added a blog and began to blog original content, utilise and expand our social media reach, custom 404 pages, removed duplicate content, utilised Moz and much more. It's been a fairly exhaustive process but we were happy to do so to be within Google guidelines. Unfortunately, some of those link-wheel pages mentioned previously were the only pages driving organic traffic, so once we were rid of these traffic has dropped to not even 10% of what it was previously. Equally with the changes (htaccess) to the link structure and the creation of brand new pages, we've lost many of the pages that previously held Page Authority.
We've 301'ed those pages that have been 'replaced' with much better content and a different URL structure - http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/bands-musicians/wedding-bands to simply http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/wedding-bands, for example. Therefore, with the loss of the 'spammy' pages and the creation of brand new 'content-driven' pages, we've probably lost up to 75% of the old website, including those that were driving any traffic at all (even with potential thin-content algorithmic penalties). Because of the loss of entire pages, the changes of URLs and the rest discussed above, it's likely the site looks very new and probably very updated in a short period of time. What I need to work out is a campaign to drive traffic to the 'new' site.
We're naturally building links through our own customerbase, so they will likely be seen as quality, natural link-building.
Perhaps the sudden occurrence of a large amount of 404's and 'lost' pages are affecting us?
Perhaps we're yet to really be indexed properly, but it has been almost a month since most of the changes are made and we'd often be re-indexed 3 or 4 times a week previous to the changes.
Our events page is the only one without the new design left to update, could this be affecting us? It potentially may look like two sites in one.
Perhaps we need to wait until the next Google 'link' update to feel the benefits of our link audit.
Perhaps simply getting rid of many of the 'spammy' links has done us no favours - I should point out we've never been issued with a manual penalty. Was I perhaps too hasty in following the rules? Would appreciate some professional opinion or from anyone who may have experience with a similar process before. It does seem fairly odd that following guidelines and general white-hat SEO advice could cripple a domain, especially one with age (10 years+ the domain has been established) and relatively good domain authority within the industry. Many, many thanks in advance. Ryan.0 -
Website rankings plummeted after a negative SEO attack - help!
Hello Mozzers A website of a new client (http://bit.ly/PuVNTp) use to rank very well. It was on the top page for any relevant search terms in its industry in Southern Ontario (Canada). Late last year, the client was the victim of a negative SEO attack. Thousands upon thousands of spammy backlinks were built (suspected to be bought using something like Fiverr). The links came from very questionable sites or just low quality sites. The backlink growth window was very small (2,000 every 24 hours or so). Since that happened that site has all but disappeared from search results. It is still indexed and the owner has disavowed most of the bad backlinks but the site can't seem to bounce back. The same happened for another site that they own (http://bit.ly/1tErxpu) except the number backlinks produced was even higher. The sites both suffer from duplicate content issues and at one point (in 2012) were de-indexed due to the very spammy work of a former SEO. They came back in early 2013 and were fine for some time. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mattylac0 -
Do rss feeds help seo in 2013?
I have seen answers for this back in 2012 but as we all now things have changed in 2013. My question is Do rss feeds help seo in 2013? Or does google see it as duplicate content (I see that the moz site has RSS ...)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Llanero0 -
301 Redirect Asp.net Help
Hey, we are redesigning the site and we are changing a lot of urls to make them more SEO friendly But some of the old urls have PR 4-5 What is the best way to do about this? How to do a 301 redirect for specific pages in asp.net Or do you recommend something elsE? Thanks in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Madz0 -
Anyone else noticing that their expired domains have lost PR?
A while back I experimented with buying some expired domains that had some PR. I built a small website on each and created content with anchor text that linked back to my main site. For one of my sites I noticed a significant drop in rankings this week. At first I thought it was because of the latest Panda update. But, the drop was slow, not sudden like most Panda hits have been. Then, I noticed that some of my previously purchased domains that had held their PR for quite a while are now PR N/A. I'm guessing that the latest algorithm change caught on to what I was doing. Probably what I was doing was grey hat. I honestly think that every SEO goes through a period where they try out some grey or even black tactics. This makes me even more desiring to be completely White hat now....and build links that are going to last. I was just wondering if any of you guys have experienced anything like this this week? Would love to hear your thoughts. EDIT: A second question - What would you guys do with these domains? They're still in the Google index so they're not penalized, likely just stripped of PR. Would you scrap them completely? Remove the links back to my sites? Do nothing?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarieHaynes2 -
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!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | flow_seo0