Doorway page penalty

[apcsilver9]

Has Google changed their interpretation of Doorway pages?We do not sell widgets but allow me to use Widget for this example;If we sold 25 very different widgets an online vendor would typically have 1 "mother" website with 25 different inner pages, each page to explain each type of widget they sell.However, for the past 9 years our approach is to have 25 different websites, one  for each widget.  With these 25 sites we concentrated on ranking the home page only .  All these sites link back to our  (No idexed)  "Mother' site via no follow links where we have our Shopping Cart and Terms of Business. We did this partly to avoid having 25 separate Shopping Carts and to avoid having to change our Terms 25 times each time that became necessary. But yes we also did this as it was so much easier to rank each different type of widget in the SERPS. Also we think its a better user experience as in our business buyers of yellow widgets will not be interested in blue widgetsWe have been reading for years that google does not like doorways pages but we were not 100% certain if they might regard our sites as such .This is because our approach has worked great for nine years. That is until December last year when all 95%  our sites fell dramatically in the SERPS usually from page 1 to page 2 or 3.  First thing we did was to go through all our sites and search for the obvious; toxic links, duplicate content, keyword density, https issues,  mobility issues, anchor text, etc etc  and of course content.   We found no obvious problems that could affect 95% of the sites at the same time  but we ordered new homepage content for most of our sites from  expert seo writers. However, after putting on this new content  3 -4 weeks ago our sites have not moved up the SERPS at all.So we are left with the inescapable conclusion that our problem is because google sees and devalues our sites as doorway pages especially as 95% of your sites have been affected all at the same time  Would any SEO experts on this forum agree or be able to offer an opinion?If so, what might be the solution going forward? We have 2 solutions under consideration;1) Remove all links from each of our 25 sites to our "mother Site"  and put a shopping cart and our TOS on each of the 25 sites so they are all truly independent stand alone websites.2) Create 25 inner pages on our mother site (after removing the no index) , for each of the 25 widgets we sell , then 301 each of the 25  individual sites home pages to its inner page on the mother site . I think this might be the best solution partly as almost all of our higher ranking competitors are ranking their inner pages not their homepage. But I worry if these 25 sites will really pass much link juice if they have been devalued by Google.?Any advice will be  gratefully received.