Google has announced that they will be taking action against websites using doorway pages.

In order to reduce the number of doorway pages that appear within the search results, Google are looking to release a new “ranking adjustment” to their classifier of doorway pages.

Many websites use doorway pages as a method for increasing their search footprint; the various doorway pages are created and then ranked in the SERPs with the sole purpose of redirecting users over to a single destination page.

Brian White from Google has said: “Over time, we’ve seen sites try to maximize their “search footprint” without adding clear, unique value. These doorway campaigns manifest themselves as pages on a site, as a number of domains, or a combination thereof. To improve the quality of search results for our users, we’ll soon launch a ranking adjustment to better address these types of pages. Sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change.”

Google should be implementing the new ranking adjustment soon, and those who are currently using doorway pages should be seeing their effects shortly.

How can you be sure that you are not using doorway pages? Here are some questions from Google to help you define whether or not any of your pages are doorway pages:

Does the page exist as an “island”, i.e. users will struggle to find the page by navigating your website, and are likely to only find it through search engines?

Is the purpose of the page to optimise for search engines and then funnel users towards another part of your website?

Does the page in question use content which is a duplicate of or very similar to another page, with a small difference/s purely so that the page can capture traffic for a different set of keywords?

Is the page intended for generating affiliate traffic, rather than providing value in terms of quality content to users?

Is your page intended to rank for very generic keywords, despite the content on the page being very specific?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you are more than likely using a doorway page and may be impacted by this new algorithmic update.