Are doorway pages making a comeback?
Most webmasters are aware that doorway pages are against the guidelines of the major search engines but recently they appear to be making a comeback on the websites of some extremely well known brands.
The definition of a doorway page is provided in the Google Webmaster Guidelines:
Doorway pages are pages specifically made for search engines. Doorway pages contain many links – often several hundred – that are of little to no use to the visitor, and do not contain valuable content. HTML sitemaps are a valuable resource for your visitors, but ensure that these pages of links are easy for your visitors to navigate. If you have a number of links to include, consider organizing them into categories or into multiple pages. But in doing so, ensure that they are intended for visitors to navigate the sections of your site, and not simply for search engines.
Google’s aim is to give our users the most valuable and relevant search results. Therefore, we frown on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the ones they selected and that provide content solely for the benefit of search engines. Sites making use of these practices may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in Google search results.
Recently we have come across sites such as propertyfinder.co.uk, reebokstore.co.uk and calendars.com using search engine optimisation methods that we believe amount to doorway page creation. The software they are using crawls the site and creates highly optimised auto generated pages that will rank highly in the search engines.
This method alone is likely to be against the Google guidelines but there is another clever twist to the system. The pages are dynamically cloaked by the referrer keyword so the content the search engines see is different to the content that searchers see when they visit the page from Google. When you visit a page the site will load up content related to whatever you were searching for on Google rather than display the content that it displayed to Google.
Some example queries are below:
Propertyfinder.co.uk
Reebokstore.co.uk
Calendars.com
The above sites appear to be cloaking based on referrer keyword but there are a number of other sites using the auto generated pages system without cloaking. Brands including Thomas Cook, B&Q, Pricerunner, Sony and Sky are some of the larger names listed on the software suppliers website.
It isn’t clear whether Google is turning a blind eye to this but we believe the auto generated pages are being designed purely for search engines rather than users and would therefore be against the guidelines. Sometimes large brands are allowed to break the Google guidelines without getting the same penalties as smaller sites and this might be what’s happening here.
If Google is sanctioning the use of this method then large e-commerce sites could make millions of pounds every year using the system, imagine creating millions of pages that gathered long tail traffic and then listed products depending what the user was searching for.
February 25th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Reference to “imagine creating millions of pages that gathered long tail traffic and then listed products depending what the user was searching for”
I am certain just by you mentioning it, someone is already working on a non-commercial private app to do just that. Scary thought, but most definitely the antithesis to long tail positioning.
February 26th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Congratulations, you have just stumbled across the world of black hat SEO. People have been auto generating webpages like this based on long tail keywords for years. It is interesting to see some big names doing it though. Just shows how competitive certain niches are getting now.
February 26th, 2008 at 10:34 am
It seems that property finder has 2 different domains – the cloaking by keyword is on .co.uk site. Whereas their main url is propertyfinder.com. On the .COM they don’t do cloaking and have like 400k indexed pages.. on .co.uk its like 70k cloaked pages.. its hard to say whether its intentional. I wouldn’t like to have content indexed on 2 different domains.. but maybe they are smart and they think if they get banned they will only ban the less important .co.uk
February 26th, 2008 at 11:26 am
A well known blogger pointed this problem out to me a while back and we discussed it. I would categorise this as more grey hat than black hat but I’m amazed that such big brands are engaging in this kind of activity.
It’s interesting to note that the company behind it (youramigo) charge per click from these pages which effectively means they don’t care about getting the sites banned that they work with.
Also – it’s worth noting that it’s not cloaking in the traditional sense (i.e. it’s not cloaking based on user agent), the same content is shown to the users and the search engines if you browse to a page from within the site. It’s only when you visit from Google that it changes.
It’s interesting to see though and even more interesting to see it working!! I’m not sure why Google hasn’t done something about this yet.
February 26th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Nice find. I think this is very clever of the companies. But one interesting this is why is it that only high profile companies like reebok resorting to it? Are they not aware of the dangers or is the so called danger/threat from google clearly insignificant to them?
February 26th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Your Amigo has been doing this for ages, its their spider linker program for large businesses. It is like “the trusted feed for google”
February 27th, 2008 at 11:20 am
The worst culprit is the Olympics website, London 2012. Trying preaching fair play, and then spamming Google with multiple autogenerated domains seems a little contradictory.
March 4th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Nice find. I think this is very clever of the companies.
April 4th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Nice find…I’ve been on their case for a while and resort to cloaking large companies website who don’t really care as long as they make the sales..
June 16th, 2008 at 2:52 am
YourAmigo’s technology does not use cloaking, nor do the pages fit the definition of “doorway pages”.
The word “cloaking” implies deception, which is clearly not the intent. The pages about which you are commenting (being only a small part of our technology) are essentially paginated sitemaps (we call them “Table of Contents” pages) that tend to change significantly as products are added and removed. This means that by the time Google has indexed the page and a user clicks through, the content has changed and that leads to a poor user experience.
To improve the user experience, where possible we dynamically generate the ToC based on the user’s search terms, but we *retain a link to the original content* with an appropriate message and *we place our name on the page*. Google’s AdWords/AdSense programs use similar technology.
These pages are created specifically in accordance with the Google technical guideline to “Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site…” and the Google design and content guideline to “Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link”. YourAmigo pages are not just for search engines; rather than being “doorway” pages, they are in fact “landing pages” which are designed for users who enter deep levels of a site directly, rather than through the normal navigation path from the home page down.
We would be pleased to discuss with you or your clients how our technology can automatically optimise millions of product pages, on a pay for performance basis, in compliance with the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
June 23rd, 2009 at 6:58 am
That is an interesting spin to what you are doing.
Your amigo does not generate a usable site map. It crawls the site and auto generates thousands of links for the search engines.
The your amigo links have absolutely no value for the end user. it is clearly designed solely for the engines.
use this search in google
site:www.brookstone.com
click on anything with the word index in the url.
you will see gibberish created for the engines.
the same with anything with the word review inside.
this is clearly a violation of the google guidelines and is nothing but web spam.