A doorway-page vendor has made my SEO life a nightmare! Advice anyone!?

[VBlue]

Hey thanks so much for the response!

And there are no stupid questions!

Before I was hired here, the company was incredibly aggressive with PPC and CSE's and spent absorbent amounts on paid traffic.

The company literally drove 2x more traffic through paid than through organic. That has changed now even though we still spend pretty aggressively. We have an excellent SEM Digital Marketing Manager that handles all paid campaigns and affiliate programs and she is run ragged on a daily basis.

I really do think it would be worth taking a look at how we can compensate with PPC on the black-hat vendor's best performing URLs and thank you so much because it is an excellent idea.

To your robot blocking question:

I would love nothing more than to insert robot text that disallows Google Bot from crawling the tree sub folders that contain all of their doorway pages. Unfortunately, they entered into a legally binding contract and this would be like an act of war against them. I actually dream about doing this to them every night so that is an awesome point you bring up!

[CommT]

Surely you can block them once the contract has been ended? I don't know how the law works where you are, but in the UK if you sever a contract you are no longer bound by it. But then again, I'm not a lawyer!!! LOL I'd be earning twice as much if I was!!! I'd look into this or get your legal team (assuming you have one) to look into it for after the contract has ended.

If they're scraping, could you put a canonical tag on your pages to self canonicalise? Only just thought of this!!! Might help, if you've not already done it.

[CommT]

Yes, redirections are 100% necessary. I agree whole heartedly.

[VBlue]

Thanks again!

Yes, that is the conundrum I am in here when it comes to "who actually owns the pages" and honestly, this vendor covered their bases. They actually house all of the pages on their own servers and basically scrape out site, then shoot them out through our CDN via a proxy or something like that. So they made sure we are at their mercy, they can pull them anytime they want.

So technically, If were were to redirect all of their pages and acquired links, it would actually not be too hard because each page is so unbelievably identical to our own organic pages. The problem is, we would have to access their server I believe and that will not happen.

It will also be one hell of a mess with 301s if we were to do that and I know someone I am planning with on our site team fears the length of the 301 chain this would cause in our htaccess file.

But we are thinking in the same ballpark as you mentioned - trying to find ways to somehow limit the 404 tsunami this would cause and see if we can "take back" some of the value they took from us in link juice.

[VBlue]

We do self-canocialize and that is a very good question. What they will do is just keep spitting out dynamically generated URLS. They have absolutely no restrictions on page quality, content, they literally have no rules. This gives them immense flexibility.

And for the contract portion: One the contract ends, all of these pages will in-fact disappear and that is why they house them on their own servers. So that is what we want in the end.

It is dealing with the massive amount of 404s that will be an issue for awhile.

[jamieisboss]

This post is deleted!

[VBlue]

Thanks Jamie!

Yea we actually partner with Oracle for our web design, engineering , implementation and so on. So when it comes to server-side issues, we would have to go through them and there is always red tape involved.

Really I cannot understand how this vendor that does this is even in business and it is beyond me how they even get away with it. The wordpress 404 plug-in is a great idea though and that will definitely help me in the future with freelancing while I am here full-time.

[jamieisboss]

Glad i could be of some help,

If I were you I'd definitely grab copies of the pages if they're still live, you could do this from home even using some free tools like

http://phpcrawl.cuab.de/about.html

http://www.openwebspider.org/

add a bit of Curl or WGET and you've got the pages plus the links and meta. Then if they do disappear suddenly and the business is stuck, you can hand this to your web people at oracle and they'll probably try and hire you, having said that, I'd imagine they've probably got a decent contingency plan because they're oracle, but you never know. Could save the day.

[VBlue]

You are a genius.

[jamieisboss]

  glad to help