Comments on: Are doorway pages making a comeback?

By: Jacob

Jacob — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:58:01 +0000

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.

By: Jon Schutz, CTO YourAmigo

Jon Schutz, CTO YourAmigo — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 02:52:46 +0000

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.

By: Jerry okorie

Jerry okorie — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 22:11:30 +0000

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..

By: Selimhanov

Selimhanov — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:54:28 +0000

Nice find. I think this is very clever of the companies.

By: dave

dave — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:20:31 +0000

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.

By: Not their amigo

Not their amigo — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:16:11 +0000

Your Amigo has been doing this for ages, its their spider linker program for large businesses. It is like “the trusted feed for google”

By: Mani Karthik

Mani Karthik — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:07:48 +0000

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?

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:26:05 +0000

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.

By: Janusz

Janusz — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 10:34:13 +0000

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

By: Matt Hopkins

Matt Hopkins — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 10:16:08 +0000

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.

By: SEO Design Solutions

SEO Design Solutions — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 23:24:20 +0000

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.