Give Google What It Wants

“A happy wife equals a happy life.”  We’ve all heard the saying, and for those of us that are married, we fully realize that this is an absolute truth!

Same thing with Google.

Content is core to SEO and because of that fact they want you to provide them with unique, relevant content to enable them to provide high quality results to a query.  One element where there has been significant issues through the years are with doorway pages.

For starters, Doorway pages refer to multiple pages within a search result but point to the same, or essentially the same page.  This can be done through using multiple domains or pages meant to funnel users from several different, yet similar pages to one deeper within the site.  Generally they are relatively thin on content and are meant to fool Google into believing they are a quality option for a query, but their strength is based on another page of content.

Bing and Yahoo! say they have an increasing market share, but a quick look at your website’s analytics may tell another story.  Even if these two search engines don’t seem to be overly competitive alongside Google, Google knows that in order to keep users coming back, they need to provide the very best, relevant organic (SEO) results possible.

Due to this fact, Google keeps tweaking their algorithm (over 600 times in 2014!!) to provide benefit to websites that put in the actual work towards creating unique content.  That content needs to be written for users, NOT for Search Engine Optimization purposes.  Of course, you can, and should put an SEO spin on your content, but in a way that Google doesn’t penalize you.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html

A good example of what Google’s blog is talking about occurs when a company serves, or is targeting, prospective customers outside of their immediate area.  Quite often in this scenario a website will have multiple pages, one for each location.  The problem arises when the information is so thin and is really intended to drive a user to a different page specifically about their product/service or contact page.  These location pages were built specifically for the search engines and have little to no actual value.  A single location in and of itself may be okay, but when Google sees all of the other locations and the information on each is so similar on each, they look at all of the pages as spammy and will ‘penalize’ them, and your site, as a whole.

There is a way to properly do this so don’t be alarmed that Google is trying to harm your site.  Know that they want to provide their users with unique, relevant results so that users keep coming back to them and not their competition.

The morale of the story is to give them what they want… just like your wife.