Steering Clear of Search Engine Spam - Vanity Domains and Doorway Pages
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Vanity Domains: Here’s one point on which I differ somewhat with iProspect, but I’m honestly not sure how the search engines treat this. I think it may be yet another case of a little bit is a good thing, but too much is too much. A vanity domain is another term for a mirror site. Basically, you make multiple copies of one web site, all featuring the exact same content, and put them on different servers with different domain names. That’s duplicate content, and that’s a no-no.
On other hand, it is entirely possible for a web site to become overwhelmed with visitors trying to access it (just ask anyone who has ever been “slashdotted”). In that case, one or two mirror domains might not be a bad idea. Even so, Google tells webmasters “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.” Yahoo! hates “Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages” and “Multiple sites offering the same content.”
Doorway Pages/Deceptive Redirects: There’s nothing good about doorway pages. A doorway page is optimized for a particular keyword or phrase but doesn’t provide any content on that topic. Instead, when a user searches for that phrase and finds the site near the top, he clicks on the link, and the page redirects him to another web site that has little or nothing to do with the topic.
Why would you want to do that to your visitors? You might get a lot of traffic, but it almost certainly won’t be the kind of traffic you want. If that keyword isn’t relevant to what you’re offering, your visitors would have been expecting something completely different when they clicked on that link. They will stay only long enough to get angry, and then go elsewhere. Google explicitly condemns this practice, telling webmasters to “Avoid ‘doorway’ pages created just for search engines, or other ‘cookie cutter’ approaches…” while Yahoo spurns “Pages dedicated to directing the user to another page” and “Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees.”
Now that you know what not to do, you can look at your site with new eyes. If you’re engaging in these practices and not doing well in the search engines, you know why. It may take a while to make the fixes and get back into the search engines’ good graces, but it will be worth it.
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