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August 30, 2008
Do Search Engines Hate Doorway Pages?
This will sound to some like a real dumb question, but here we go anyways....
Do search engines hate Doorway Pages?
Don't you love it at certain seminars, when some speaker stands up there and shouts "ALL DOORWAY Pages are BAD! They are Spam, they are EVIL. But the trouble is sometimes that's about all these speakers ever say. They don't stop to help the listeners understand why or for that matter, explain the correct way to do SEO.
If you've heard some presentations, you'll know what I mean.
So questions will arise around the subject of gateway information pages or doorway pages.
People have heard that "doorway pages" are BAD and some have stated that search engines "hate doorway pages".
For clarification on these type of issues, let's start by explaining some simple ground rules looking beyond the jargon and terminology.
Do Search Engines Hate Doorway Pages?
To answer this we'll examine it in two steps.
Let's understand:
1. What it is that the Search Engines "hate or don't appreciate"?
and then...
2. What type of pages the search engines "LOVE or do appreciate"?
With this approach it will help us gain some understanding of the criteria that is most important.
1. What the Search Engines HATE:
a) To put it simply, search engines despise low quality doorway pages that contain little or no useful content. Pages that only have a purpose of cluttering up the search index, but really have no reason to exist.
A few years ago these type of low quality doorway pages were rampantly produced as a means to try and trick the search engines. Looking at it from the search engines point of view, why even publish a page if all it contains is a couple of lines of text and an "enter the store" link.
So to be sure....Pages with VERY LITTLE VALUE to the reader, do not belong in a search engine's index.
b) Search engines also despise any kind of duplication for the purpose of manipulation. (I'm not talking about articles or news, because they are meant for syndication.)
Again, little or no content (often just garbled text or keyword rich paragraphs that have no real value) were reproduced over and over and cluttered up the search engines. These pages were supposedly going to bring great traffic but the bottom line is that they were and still are all labeled by engines as Spam. Nobody wants to see junk in the search results.
c) Search engines hate any attempt made by Webmasters to manipulate pages optimized with content unrelated to the actual Web site. Some Webmasters were guilty of all types of trickery to try and attract clicks regardless of the site content.
When is the last time you read some marketer's sales letter that they were going to sell you some e-book that will teach you "sneaky tricks." The whole language is wrong because the search engines do not care where you rank if your content is good content and relevant. You don't need to be "sneaky" or to be "tricky" to gain long term stable rankings that will last for years.
You are not trying to win a war with the search engines. That is nonsense. You never have been in competition or at war with search engines (unless of course you are a search engine.)
The only one you truly ever compete with is your competitor.
But understanding the Spam issues, clearly you could NEVER blame the search engines for their war on Spam and low value doorway pages which contained no useful content or information.
Next let's talk about
2. What pages the Search Engines LOVE:
a) Search engines love pages that far "information rich" and contain useful, original content that will actually make valued
reading to the online visitors.
b) Instead of doorway pages (or pages with no value or little useful content), the term "information rich" can be used to
describe a page loaded with useful, quality information. Search engines love pages that are content rich and able to stand on it's own merit. A quality information page is also part of the overall Web site allowing visitors to obtain more relevant and useful information having easy navigation through the Web site.
Instead of lightweight pages with no content, today's pages need to contains high quality information, which is relevant to
the online audience. The information rich page is 100% quality, put together with research, relevance, thought and care.
No tricks are ever needed.
Next Question is.....
What kind of information goes into creating an information rich high performance page?
Invariably this question often comes up when I am teaching one of our live hands-on workshops. People need to understand that this is wide open to all the discoveries you make while researching your target audiences behavior. How you can meet the audience's needs exactly, is only limited to "your imagination" and the most effective way to present the information you know they are looking for, back too them. You want to give them what they "really want" as opposed to what you "think" they want and do this right up front.
The focus is on creating genuinely "useful content"...
The focus is on creating genuinely "useful content" for your ideal target audience of "potential customers" who happen to be already out there searching for you.
Not only is this what your visitors want, it's also the key to success for search engine acceptance. You will never run in to trouble with search engines by offering lots of original, quality content that is interesting, useful and of high value, to your online readers.
In brief, key to success for attracting your target audience, is doing quality research on your target audiences searching behavior and learning to identify their needs and what they are searching for and then, giving them what it is that they really want.
Learn how to create useful content that is well focused and satisfies the reason why the searcher clicked that search button.
Okay, so what kind of information might a information rich page really contain? That will depend on what "your research" reveals of course.
By the way, are you doing some seasonal research?
Try out this tool...KeywordDiscovery.com
Why do I suggest you check out the free trial?
This tool options for researching Historical data, News data, Premium data, E-bay data or data based on shopping. Not only that but Keyword Discovery also has the advantages of the news database which contains searches performed at major news sites and news portals. Great research for SEO involving PR. Plus there collection of data is enormous with the historical global Keyword database containing over 36 billion searches from at least 200 different search engines. Plus full support for English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish and several other languages.
Check out their free trial here.
Posted by John at August 30, 2008 03:37 PM