Google’s About To Close Your Local Doorway Pages

Today Google published “An update on doorway pages”. The post implies that Google will soon be updating its algorithm to weed out offending doorway pages from the SERPs:

Sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change.

While sites with spammy set ups such as multiple exact match domains that link to the same landing page are likely the targets (get ready for more Lawyer leads SEOs!), Google’s well-intended algorithm updates often go too far so brace yourselves for collateral damage, even if you think you have a good set up. Some potential issues:

• Local directory sites with geo-SERPs that have the same content. For example, when one gas station serves two rural towns a site will have two pages – Gas Stations in City A & Gas Stations in City B – that have substantially the same content and lead to the same gas station profile. If these get hit, these sites will likely have to choose to only display results that are actually in the searched geo, which could have huge implications as to how data is displayed across the entire site.
• Service area pages that don’t have unique content. We have long seen issues with sites that use cookie cutter text to create multiple service area pages. While plenty of sites still get by with it, I imagine this algorithm could finally snuff out this tactic. Get your content writers ready.
• Franchise businesses – they have all of these issues in spades – particularly those who have microsites for every location. While cookie-cutter implementations make sense to easily create a lot of local sites, it’s possible Google will throw these local babies out with the bathwater.

I don’t want to be too alarmist. This update may be no big deal, but when I see Google use the phrase “broad impact”, I tend to get a bit paranoid.

And then there’s this:

For example, searchers might get a list of results that all go to the same site. So if a user clicks on one result, doesn’t like it, and then tries the next result in the search results page and is taken to that same site that they didn’t like, that’s a really frustrating experience.

Might be a good time to short Yelp: