However when a site visitor would land on these pages their browser WOULD execute the JavaScript forcing a redirect to the home page.

So in essence, a person searching for 'used cars' in Germany would more than likely come across the optimized garbage doorway page and think it was something useful only to be redirected to the main BMW site upon clicking on the link.

Matt Cutts even posted about this violation of the Google Terms of Service by saying: "That's a violation of our webmaster quality guidelines, specifically the principle of Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users."

The reason I'm bringing this up is because I can't tell you how many clients ask us "but why can't we use doorway pages - our competitors are doing it?"

This should be all the reason you need. If BMW gets removed from Google for such tactics, do you think your site would be any less vulnerable?

You see, Matt Cutts is a big anti-spam guy. He's Google's Anti-Spam Avenger. He has access to lots of sophisticated tools which are used to shortlist pages which are likely spamming, and then his team reviews them to see if this is the case.

He even gave attendees of the recent PubCon (the WebmasterWorld conference in Las Vegas) a quick peek at these tools, so we do know they exist.

And doorway pages aren't the only target. Duplicate content can also get you penalized if not removed from the index. Google's own quality guidelines specifically say "Don''t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content."

In other words, if you have one page which appears in hundreds of different locations on your site, with hundreds of different names, there's a good chance that Google will catch you and penalize or ban your site for such tactics.

Granted with a large site there's bound to be duplication of content, so I'm sure Google has some sort of allowable threshold, but be realistic.

If you have any concern at all as to the number of pages you have, then you're probably going to have the Google spam cops looking closely at your site. This is because if you're questioning the validity of all those duplicate pages chances are Google will too.

So to those sites which use doorways or excessive duplicate content, please take a look at Matt Cutts blog about this incident. While the article is about an international site on Google.de don't fool yourself by thinking that Google.com doesn't follow the same rules: Google has always hated doorways and duplicate content, but now its stepped up its fight against them.


Rob Sullivan
Head Organic Search Strategist
Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing

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