Is it possible we are being penalized for doorway pages?

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

www.trophycentral.comHi, we were hit very hard a few years ago by Panda and have been try to recover.  We completely revamped our site (structure, canonical, duplicates, content, etc.) and had a couple of keywords recover. However, most traffic has not comeback and still cannot be found in the top 30 pages or so for major phrases.  We have compared ourselves to major competitors in our industry and see very few differences. The only thing I see as a difference is that many of our products are in multiple sections. For example, we have all baseball awards (trophies, pins, medals) grouped together.  We then have just baseball medals together and just baseball pins together.  Is this something that could be causing us not to rank?  I am asking because the phrases that are ranking are the ones that don't have multiple categories.  We have no manual penalties, but now I am thinking this is what Google might consider a doorway page?As an experiment, I just noindexed all but one category for baseball and soccer to see what happens.Does this make sense?  Has anyone else seen this?Thanks!

[LesleyPaone]

I would not think so. If you are using a logical division of products using categories and sub categories, I cannot see that holding you back. It is really the defacto standard on how e-commerce sites work. As long as your site is not doing something weird with the re-writes on the the products I think you would be fine. A weird rewrite would be like this, say you are selling a baseball pin. If your rewrites do this site.com/baseball-things/pin.html and the page is also at site.com/baseball-things/pins/pin.html then I would highly suggest using canonical urls. Because one of the pages is going to get a duplicate content penalty.

Another thing I would suggest is if you are not already, use category descriptions for the category pages and also mix the products. You don't want your main category to have 75% of the products that a sub category has. Like in the example above, if 3/4 of the products in the baseball root category are pins, I would change that to be a more even number between the categories.

Also one other suggestion, I wouldn't use empty categories either. Like for basketball, if all you offer is trophies, I would not have a basketball category then a basketball trophies category. That would be seen as duplicate content.

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

Thanks, Lesley.  What you are saying makes perfect sense and putting products in categories seems pretty pervasive.  I don't really think this was the issue, but I am running out of things to change. (-:  I am definitely suffering from a Panda penalty, but still not sure why as I have cleaned up all of the common issues.  I have a couple of phrases that came back to page 2 or 3 (not where I want, but it's a start), such as Award Ribbons and Award Plaques.  So I tried to compare those pages to my other ones and this is what I came up with (these products are not in multiple categories). Again, like you I don't think this is the issue, but I figured I would test it as maybe Google is somehow getting confused with how the categories are created.

Again, many thanks.

PS  If you happen to see anything else that looks funny, please let me know!  We have been in business since 1999, so it is hard to have virtually no traffic from Google!

[Berner]

I am interested as well to see what others think. I agree with the categories and dup content issues that could occur.

Please keep us all posted

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

The duplication of the products is not highly likely to be causing an issue here given that many ecommerce sites operate like this, but duplicate content was one of the primary issues Panda sought to weed out. It seems as if Panda can be very hard to get rid of, even if you have cleaned up 99% of the issue: you're doing the same or better than similar sites that are not under a penalty but the penalty remains because a certain amount of duplication (or another issue) remains.

Is the problem uniform - i.e. all products that rank well are not duplicated, and all products that have ranking problems are duplicated?

The structure without category URLs is a little abnormal too but what amounts to a flat website shouldn't hold you back completely either.

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

Hi Jane, thanks for your response.

Yes, the sections that are ranking better do not have as many products listed in other sections.  That is why I originally thought we might be getting dinged.  But have products in multiple categories is very common, so it is likely a coincidence.  I have made some changes to experiment, so I guess I will find out soon enough.

I also realized that I may be getting hurt by the tabs on our item pages.  While our descriptions are getting indexed, because they are tabbed I am told they may be carrying a much lower value.  So I am changing this as well.

Can you elaborate on what you mean be the structure without category URLs?  The vast majority of products should be in a category (trophies, plaques, etc.).  I guess we do have some that are not which I could remove or put in a category, but I want to be sure I know which ones you might be looking at.

Thanks again!  … Neil

[JaneCopland]

Hi Neil,

What I mean by category URLs is that a product sits on a URL like http://www.trophycentral.com/5x7blacmarpl.html, rather than http://www.trophycentral.com/plaques/insertplaques/5x7blacmarpl.html but as I said, the flat structure you are using can work as well. Putting products in structures like that can get confusing if products exist in multiple categories and make way for duplicate content (i.e. a product is found under multiple different URLs). Just worth mentioning though because it's not common to see such a flat structure nowadays with the ecommerce platforms a lot of folks are using, like Magento, etc.

I wouldn't worry too much about tabs. If the content behind tabs is a) not incredibly long, b) relevant to the page, and c) available in the source code on page load (i.e. it doesn't require the execution of a JavaScript function to pull the content into the tab / onto the page), Google can see this content and should treat it much the same as if the content wasn't tabbed.

Cheers,

Jane