How best to clean up doorway pages. 301 them or follow no index ?

[PeteC12]

Hi Mozzers,

I have what is classed as doorway pages on my website. These have historically been location specific landing pages for some of our categories but from speaking to a number of different webmasters , then general consensus is that they are not in google guidelines so I will be getting punished by having them.

My options are :

1. I can 301 the pages back to their original category pages . This will conserve some link juice to pass back to the respective category page.

2. I can set these as Follow No index. Not sure what will happen here with regards to link value etc.

What would be best ?... Some of the pages do currently rank "fairly well" for some of the locations so I am getting traffic from them but I also know I will be getting a algorithmic penalty for having them so how best I clean these up ?.

Also , by cleaning up the site structure , would I see any benefit here ? or will I have to wait for a new panda update/ refresh ? I thought the panda refresh won't use a new dataset

thanks

Pete

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Honestly, I would get rid of them if they are blatantly doorway pages. The point of a doorway page is to show crawlers one thing and then a user another thing that are unrelated. Unless those pages are useful, ranking for relevant terms, and can be redirected to a relevant page (at which point they aren't doorway pages), then I would do that.

I would make sure what you have are doorway pages, and if they are, just lose them and build equity in pages that should be ranking for those queries.

When it comes to your site architecture - I would make sure that's top notch regardless of upcoming algorithms. Never build a site in fear of updates, always build it for the best possible user experience and make sure that it's living up to their expectations. Make users happy, and the search engines will reward you.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[BradsDeals]

By "doorway pages" you just mean a thin, off-site landing page which quickly funnels a visitor onto your main site, correct?

If it hasn't been hit with a manual penalty, it ranks well, AND it's got links worth keeping (note the qualifier there), I'd go for the 301. But only if it can meet all three of those criteria. If it didn't, then I'd let it 404.

[PeteC12]

Hello,

Well these pages are onsite but I've been told they can also be classed as doorway pages or at best, spammy..

So for example - you can see below I have a main "cleaning Equipment category" and I also have cleaning equipment category pages for different locations , so these would serve carpet cleaners in London , carpet cleaners in Brighton , carpet cleaners in manchester and so on.

www.site.co.uk/cleaning-equipment/carpet-cleaners
www.site.co.uk/cleaning-equipment-london/carpet-cleaners
www.site.co.uk/cleaning-equipment-brighton/carpet-cleaners
www.site.co.uk/cleaning-equipment-manchester/carpet-cleaners
www.site.co.uk/cleaning-equipment-liverpool/carpet-cleaners

All the location pages have unique content , title tags , h1 tags etc but I've been told they look spammy and they are in effect doorway pages as I trying to get a local search footprint in different cities. .

what I want to change it to , is just have the www.site.co.uk/cleaning-equipment/carpet-cleaners page and either 301 the location pages or follow no index them.

thanks

Pete

[CleverPhD]

Key point by Rebecca, use data to make this decision.  I just 410'ed almost 800 old pages/articles from a website I help run.  They were all republished press releases that were at least 2 years old, they got less than 9 organic pageviews over the past 6 month period and no link equity.  You have to do some work with merging this data from GA and OSE, but it is worth it.  I could say that when I deleted these 800 pages I was not losing significant traffic or links and I was improving my crawl efficiency with Google and potentially a quality factor with Google as they were not having to look at crappy old content.  Another way to say this is that if users were not visiting the pages nor were they linking to them, how could they be useful and if anything would make my site look less reputable to them.

Cheers!

FYI - the spider Screaming Frog (one of my fav tools) just integrated with the GA API, so you can crawl and get GA data combined. (You can also just play with GA filters as well).  If Screaming Frog can get the tool to access the Moz API - BOOM! That would make this work so much easier.  (Hint hint mozzers this would be an amazing tool for the Moz crawler as well!)