Google to toughen up on spammy doorway pages

Google plans to launch an adjustment to its search ranking algorithms to better fight against doorway pages.

According to Google, doorway pages are causing inconvenience to users because when clicking on a new search result they are redirected back to a site they previously exited.

“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,” Brian White, who works for Google’s webspam team, explained on the search giant’s Webmaster blog.

“We have a long-standing view that doorway pages that created solely for search engines can harm the quality of the user’s search experience.

“Sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change,’ he warned.

What Google considers spammy doorpages to be are:

• Multiple domain names that funnel users to one page
• Pages that rank on generic terms yet entail very specific content
• Pages that duplicate aggregations, such as locations and products, that already exist on the site in order to gain more search traffic
• Pages that don’t create unique value in content or functionality yet draw in affiliate traffic
• Pages that exist as an ‘island’ from the rest of the site, and are difficult to navigate from the other parts of the site. This can include links to island pages from other pages within the site.