Google has announced an update to their algorithm & quality guidelines – specifically cracking down on doorway pages. For those of you wondering – a doorway page is a page designed specifically to rank for certain search queries. The search user lands on one of these pages and then either clicks through or gets rather sneakingly redirected to a different page.
This entire practice has long been against Google’s quality guidelines, but unfortunately that hasn’t really deterred much people from trying it. Back in 2005, Google’s Matt Cutts advised people not to hire an “assclown SEO that makes doorway pages with sneaky redirects”. In 2010 Google started sending out notifications within Webmaster Tools to site owners who were utilizing Doorway pages in an attempt to gain SEO rankings.
In an effort to further push people away from utilizing Doorway pages within their SEO campaigns, Brian White from Google’s Web Spam team posted on Monday announcing an upcoming algorithm change which will directly target these types of pages.
Over time, we’ve seen sites try to maximize their “search footprint” without adding clear, unique value. These doorway campaigns manifest themselves as pages on a site, as a number of domains, or a combination thereof. To improve the quality of search results for our users, we’ll soon launch a ranking adjustment to better address these types of pages. Sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change.
Furthermore Google has also updated their quality guidelines regarding Doorway pages.
Doorways are sites or pages created to rank highly for specific search queries. They are bad for users because they can lead to multiple similar pages in user search results, where each result ends up taking the user to essentially the same destination. They can also lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination.