Google Webmaster Guidelines inform us a new key update that extends concept of "Doorway pages". This kind of pages were penalised for Google Panda in February 2011.
According to this extension of the doorway pages definition are considered as doorway pages, and thus eliminated from the search engine results pages (SERP), those pages designed exclusively for good positions for specific searches queries, where each results ends up taking the user to essentially the same destination.
Google Webmaster Guideline - Quality Guidelines comments some example of doorways:
- Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page
- Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s)
- Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy
Google: Identifying Multiples pages for the same keyword.
The second and third elements about new concept of doorway pages have been SEO techniques near to black hat developed in the past five years. Some kind of these pages have been detected as spam pages in several Panda and Penguin updates. Others, more sophisticated in their heriarchical level organisation, have been survived the Google anti-spam campaign.
The principal target of these approaches are that different pages of the same website have the best positions, ten first results, on a search engine results page (SERP) for highly competitive keywords or, in some case, in keywords classified as long tails but with high conversion rate.
A simple example in the area of software download industry:
The firsts positions are from the same web site Adobe and Softonic.
Google: One (page)
Yes, Google is U2 fan. Google wants one page and no more from the same web site in search index results. Google has worked around this idea many times developing retrieval information algorithms. Google always is working to identify original content even introducing a new meta tag, canonical, which give to web developer the opportunity to inform where is the original content.
Google needs high quality results which mean clean SERP because it is its principal income source. Good results, more users, more advertisers.
And when a same web site can manipulate Google algorithms or circumvent control algorithms then we only have to wait some time to suffer a new Google update in its main Zoo anti-spam: Panda, Penguin, etc.
Here we can see another example of pages high probably considered as a new "doorway pages". The image shows results searching "descargar ares gratis" (download ares free)
A page of this type appears at position 7. This is a search results page that is not part of the users experience in an hierarchical level.
So how this search results page has been considered as a landing pages for Google algorithm? If we can check carefully the end of this page we see links to content as news or even web site sections that give Google elements to evaluate this page as an indexable standard page.
In the coming days, with the entry of the new Panda, know how far Google considers these spam pages and where the places in their SERP.
Conclusions
Work SEO thinking optimize without generating content spam always leads us to wonder what is spam for Google and if you decide to use any technique that may be considered spam, you should always think that at a certain point Google can close the spam by which these positioned.
Gratitude
This post has been possible to good teammate Alberto Castro @ breed97 you, faithful reader Google Webmaster Guidelines informed me of this new update.
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