Google Doorway Page Penalty 3 Steps To Take
Google’s latest SEO change, which should get rolled out any day now will affect a lot of businesses. I have had a lot of questions from business owners about what actions they should take now. Here are the steps we are taking.
1. Brace for impact
Our approach for this update is to wait and see it’s impact. No matter what some people may tell you, we won’t really know what the effect will be until it is rolled out. Unlike say the Penguin update this is not a punitive measure where you will have to beg the Google God for forgiveness. So there is no need to repent right now and quite frankly the details are a little sketchy on what you would be repenting for. The other reason to take a “wait and see” approach, is that if you go and make changes now and your rankings still drop after the update, you wont know which change to roll back.
Where are you now?
Understand where you are ranking now and what pages are ranking. Check to see if you think any of those pages fit into Google’s obscure definition of a doorway page. At least then if you do get hit you won’t be looking around to see if anyone got the number of the truck.
Who is above you?
Take a snapshot of sites above you. For the phrase “SEO Consultant” we’re currently in 2nd spot today. This is a potential search that could be hit by this update.
The page that is optimised for SEO Consultant could be mistaken for a doorway page, given that it is heavily optimised. I don’t think it will be though as it is part of a series and not sitting out on it’s own, orphaned from the rest of the site.
2. Assess Other Options
Is there another existing page that you could optimise if things go awry? Make sure that it is linked well internally as I show in today’s video.
Can you add more content to a page that has been whacked? Like the example in the video, if that one drops from the no.1 position. The first thing I would do would be to add more content that is helpful to the user and make it a useful resource page on the site.
3. Watch for the recrawl
Stalking the Googlebot is a favourite pastime of mine. I know, get a life. Google will not let you know with any real accuracy what it is crawling and when. Just because a page of yours is not appearing in the index does not necessarily mean that Google has not crawled it yet. In fact for most sites Google will usually crawl the content within minutes of publishing. Time for getting into the index though is anyone’s guess. At least if you know the page has been crawled though, you can eliminate that from the equation. We use ecSTATic plugin on WordPress to track the bots. If you have questions or comments drop them below.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
