Shari On Doorway Pages

Are you confused about what doorway pages are after reading on this blog, you should read a short summary by SEO expert Shari Thurow. Although it is written as long back as 2004 (when we all wore powdered wigs), it is still valid.Shari Thurow’s starting point is of course that the search engines consider doorway pages as spam. “If you or your SEM firm violates the terms and conditions set forth by both the human-based (Yahoo directory, Open Directory, Business.com) and spider-based (Google, Inktomi, Teoma) search engines, both your site and the SEM firm’s site will be penalized or banned.”

Shari goes on to show us some of the characteristics of doorway pages. Read the whole article if you want all details. Here I’ll extract what is of interest in the cases we have written about here on this blog. In the case about the Norwegian SEO our view was fully shared by the Google Webspam Team, with the exclusion of the SEO firm from Google as a consequence.

So, what is a doorway page? What are the doorway page characteristics? This is how Shari Thurow puts it:

“Doorway pages come in all shapes and sizes. Some are very easy to spot. They’re often computer-generated, text-only pages of gibberish. If human visitors viewed the page, they wouldn’t purchase from the company. The page is ugly and nonsensical.

Yet some doorway pages are very, very attractive and difficult to spot. They’re designed to visually blend in to a Web site. They have graphic images and navigation schemes. The content contains complete sentences, paragraphs, even reasonable calls to action (CTA). Spam doorway pages aren’t necessarily computer-generated. Staff at SEM firms can and do write doorway page content.”

Doorway pages can take many forms. The basics is that they are made to manipulate the search results. This is something neither we (the users), nor the search engines will accept. If you can’t compete following the ethical guidelines and the abundance of good (often) free SEO advices available, you should spend your money on AdWords and other marketing activities.

Shari Thurow asks everyone to be on the alert for artificial links. She writes: “Listen for any phrase that resembles “instant link popularity.” Even if you don’t change your site, unethical SEM firms may build hundreds, even thousands, of doorway pages that point to your site to artificially boost link popularity.”

Artificial linking is never a good thing. But when is a link artificial? Let’s turn it upside down and ask: What is a natural link? Natural links are unpaid “votes” from one web page to another. A link from you to your partners is of course legitimate. Also links to related pages, links to pages you would like your users to visit (like my link to Shari’s article), links to other sites you may have, links to customers etc. But when a coffe shop in Bangkok is linking to a dentist in Oslo, and a lawyer in Stockholm is linking to a shop selling dildos and whips, something fishy is obviously going on. (None of these examples have any relevance to our latest analysis.)

So what does Shari Thurow offer instead of doorway pages? The same as every decent SEO would do: search engine friendly information pages meant for users and with an “invitation” to visit them in the form of menu elements or links with meaningful anchor text. Let’s say you sell car stereo systems. It would be considered a good thing from a search engine point of view (because it would be relevant and interesting for the users) to make information pages (or in Scandinavia we would call them “temasider“) about the different car stereo brands, the different models etc. Or how about making the ultimate car stereo history page, showing old car stereos? This might also be a good link baiting strategy, gathering natural links from enthusiasts and maybe even museums with high PageRank (if the page is good, of course).

Shari Thurow says that “the primary goal of an information page is to provide useful information to your target audience. Examples of information pages include tips, set-up instructions, FAQs, and glossaries. […]Information pages reside on your Web server and are a natural part of your W site. In fact, links to information pages tend to be in the main navigation scheme.”

The navigation is a key issue when we talk about doorway pages. If your pages are meant for users, they will be integrated in the navigational structure in some way or another, but not necesserely available from the homepage. If you want customers to find a page, you lead him to it. You don’t hide the links from the users in a sitemap link or a sitemap symbol. The sitemap links and symbols Aleksika and Prioritet used, led to doorway sitemaps, not sitemaps as Google and usability guys recommend.

Shari Thurow actually addresses the doorway sitemap issue in her article. She calls the Aleksika/Prioritet type of sitemap for “hallway pages”: “A hallway page is created specifically to link to doorway pages. A hallway page sounds like a modified site map, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, a hallway page is exactly that – a modified site map that links to doorway pages.”

Read Shari Thurow’s article: How to Spot Search Engine Spam: Doorway Pages

The easy solution for Doorway pages

Doorway pages, info pages or hallway pages are different names for pages made for Search engines. In Google Quality Guidelines Google advices us to:
• Make pages for users, not for search engines.
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings
• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines

The problem with Doorway pages is not the pages themselves, or the content. But the fact that they are only accessible through a search engine search or links that is almost invisible for the ordinary user. This leads Google to the conclusion that users that visits the website by a link to the homepage sees fewer pages than Googles spider does. The hidden pages is made for showing up with high ranking in the search engines result pages and has only one-way links to the homepage or the websites ordinary pages.

What Google (and the other search engines) want is that all pages (or information) is equally visible both for the ordinary user and for the search engines spiders.

So our simple advice is to make the Doorway pages visible from the home page. Either through the main menu or trough a visible link with a meaningful anchor text. (Why not call them info-pages if that is what they are).

Visibility is not always easy to define. These two examples below is visibility defined as “hidden” by Google. And these solutions caused penalty from Google.

The first one is the old Bolia case where the links was hidden behind the grey vertical text on the right side. In the second example the links was hidden behind the tree-structure (sitemap) symbol in the bottom left area:

Aleksika’s link farms may be excluded by Google

One of the comments from Aleksika is that the link farm pages they use to lead search engines to the doorway pages are not indexed by Google and have no effect on the ranking of their customers.

Not one of the link farms we have checked, have robots.txt requesting a nofollow or noindex to the search engines. So when a link farm is not indexed, it is excluded by Google because it violates the guidelines and – indeed – have no value for users. Google does not want these link farms in their index.

The main point with these link farms is that they are used to lead search engines to doorway pages otherwise not accessible to users.

The link farmes have inherited PageRank from their previous owners, as the print screens show.

The link farms appear to be banned from Google recently since thay haven’t lost their PageRank, but since Google seldom talks about the sites they ban, we may never know if this has happened as a result of the report or if they have targeted Aleksika’s link farms some other way at an earlier stage. The interesting thing is that they are not in the Google index. And Aleksika have not shut Google out with a robots.txt - that we have checked.

See for yourself:

This means that the domain still has a PageRank (which normally indicates that it is indexed by Google). It also means that there are site(s) linking to the domain. At the same time the domain is not indexed by Google, which is a sign that the domain is banned.

Aleksika’s comments

Aleksika has commented some of our findings in the report, and can be downloaded here.

Danish SEO Aleksika uses link farms and doorway pages

A report on the Danish SEO company Aleksika is now available. SEO Spam Cops have analyzed Aleksika’s extensive use of doorway pages and link farms to manipulate SERPs.

Aleksika is in our opinion clearly violating the ethical guidelines in order to boost rankings for their customers.

In our report we list a selection of the link farms and give in-depth analysis of the doorway pages on selected sites.

Download (2 reports)

• SEO company Aleksika’s use of doorway pages on clients’ sites – and their use of link farms to boost ranking in SERPs (PDF)
• Appendix: A selection of doorway pages that get inbound links from SEO company Aleksika’s link farms (PDF)

The Main report is 2,05MB and the Appendix is 235K.

If you experience problems with downloading try:
the SEOforum download archive 

Report on Mestergronn.no

A new report from SEO Spam Cops is now released. It shows how the site Mestergronn.no uses doorway pages and how the SEO company behind them, Aleksika, uses link generating spam sites (a kind of link farms) to boost the ranking by making numerous links directly to the doorway pages.

Update 7.february: Mestergronn.no removed all the Doorway pages immediatly after the release of the report and says that they did not know this technique was violating the SEO guidelines.  We thank Mestergrønn.no for quick response.

Download the report “The use of doorway pages on www.mestergronn.no” here

Prioritet.no - Update

SEO Spam Cops is monitoring these websites and reports the findings to Google.

On www.interdekk.no the menu is changed to “seo sider” as you can see in the updated list below. This is not done by Prioritet.no but by AdNow.dk which claims that the menu “seo sider” with the underlying Doorwaypages on the domain “http://interdekk.adnow.dk/interdekk/” is following the Google Guidelines. Well, it is not but Interdekk seems to believe AdNow and until then Prioritet will not implement their new seo solution for Interdekk.no.

Here is the list per Des 19th 2007:

Noframes with SE friendly text

In the good old days when frames still were considered the state of the art, it was not unusual to use NOFRAMES so that those with browsers that didn’t handle frames could have an alternative text to see.

Some bright heads found out that this also could be used to manipulate the search engines by showing the users something else than the search engines.

Customers of Prioritet removed from the Google index

Following the removal of norwegian SEO company Prioritet from the Google index (going on four months), their customers are now experiencing exclusion from the Google index.

Prioritet has a lot to explain to their customers. Three of their customers - Citymaid.no, Ferner.no and Direktmedia.no has been removed from the Google index. So far they have been gone for 5 days.

Citymaid.no is one of the web sites that removed the “Prioritet-menu”, but kept the doorway pages. The doorway pages can be found in the /info/ folder - for example http://www.citymaid.no/info/flytterengjoering.aspx

The doorway pages from Prioritet at Fernerjacobsen.no and Ferner.no has not been removed. Its reasonable to assume that the reason Ferner.no has been expelled from the index is the doorway pages located in the folder /ps/
http://www.ferner.no/ps/moerk_dress.html

Direktmedia.no first tried to hide the menu by making it invisible with CSS. Prioritet’s doorway pages is still found on Direktmedias homepage.
http://www.direktmedia.no/info/direkte_markedsfoering.html

Its reasonable to asume that the combination of doorway pages and hiding the menu is the reason for the removal from the index.

Is it hard for Prioritet to find the doorway pages? No! We have documented near as all of the URLs in our reports about their methods. If Prioritet really wanted, they could have cleaned up their customers sites months ago.

How long will it take for Prioritets customers to be re-included in the index? That depends on whether Google has put in place a specific time constrained penalty (30 days, 90 days etc), or if they will only allow the customers of Prioritet back in the index after they have cleaned up and requested a re-inclusion in the index.

Prioritet out for ages

It’s Wednesday night, and as promised SEO Spam Cops will give a short update on the Norwegian SEO company Prioritet in Googles index.

As we all know, Prioritet got thrown out of Google’s index three months ago. Three months and one week, to be exact. Last week, Prioritet was visible in the index for a few days. By obvious reasons, I believe that Prioritet was included in the index by a mistake, not by any filter as first mentioned.

My wild guess is that Prioritet will face another period of 3, 6 or even 9 months at worst. Any earlier inclusion would only happen if Prioritet clean up their work and fill out a re-inclusion request.