The Transcript

The Truth Behind Doorway Pages and Why They Matter for SEO, with Duane Forrester of Bing.com

Loren Baker: Hello and welcome to another episode of Search & Deploy. This is your host Loren Baker, and on Search & Deploy, a Rainmaker.FM podcast, we discuss news in the world of SEO, SEM, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, and kind of cut through a lot of the noise to determine what’s important, what’s real, and how to implement those real happenings into your overall digital strategy.

With me today I have a special guest, Duane Forrester, the senior marketing manager at Microsoft Bing. I’m going to bring Duane on in a moment, but I want to go over some of the topic matter that’s going to be discussed today.

Earlier last week, Google rolled out an announcement on the Google Webmaster Central Blog saying that they are going to be unleashing a new algorithmic update targeting doorway pages. I’ve not heard the word ‘doorway pages’ for about 10 or 15 years, but Google has made the announcement that this is going to be something they’re targeting, and they’re making updates to the Webmaster Guidelines accordingly.

Is the purpose to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site, or are they an integral part of your site s user experience?

They asked a series of questions for webmasters to think about. The first question is ‘Is the purpose of the page to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual, visible, or relevant portion of the site?’ Meaning, is that page living outside of the rest of the site only for search purposes, and then bringing the user in to make a transaction? They asked a lot of other similar questions in terms of are the pages using duplicate content, or aggregating content from the main site itself only to appear in search? Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic, and then sends the user over to a site to make a purchase where the owner of a doorway page makes a commission revenue off of that?

Very interesting news to come from the way of Brian White on the Google Webmaster Team. Also this pretty much has SEO scrambling. Not that setting up SSL on your site was enough, or getting ready for the April 21st mobile update on the Google side, but now webmasters have something else to worry about. Like I said before, I haven’t heard the word ‘doorway pages’ for almost a decade. On that note, I’d like to introduce Duane Forrester the senior marketing manager of Microsoft Bing. Welcome to Search & Deploy, Duane.

Duane Forrester: Thank you very much Loren, it s a pleasure to spend some time with you guys today.

Loren Baker: Yeah, really excited to have you on for our third episode. We made it to No. 15 in the iTunes podcast marketing category, right?

Duane Forrester: Excellent, well done.

Loren Baker: Yeah, so my goal is to get to No. 10, and then No. 1 maybe one day.

Duane Forrester: I was going to say. You re setting your goal at No. 10, awesome.

Loren Baker: Yeah, low.

Duane Forrester: Come on, we can all do better than that for you.

Loren Baker: I’m No. 10, we’re No. 10! Like I was saying, I think the last time I actually used the word ‘doorway page’ was when I was optimizing for Alta Vista back in the day. It’s such a broad and vague term — and I don’t want to necessarily get into what’s happening on the Google side of things — but I really want to talk with you about doorway pages as a whole. What do you feel that they are now, and how did you feel that they were back in the day and whether this is a broader thing.

Because it was really interesting what I just brought up — we’re talking about websites that are utilizing content aggregators from maybe their product pictures, maybe it’s multiple blog posts. We’re talking about affiliates. We re probably talking about commercial sites as well. In your professional opinion, given your years in this industry, what do you consider a doorway page? More frankly, what was the last time you actually heard this term used?

Duane Forrester: I’ll do these in reverse order, Loren. Like you, it’s been a long time since I’ve heard any conversations about doorway pages in a meaningful way. Random large companies will contact me and I ll sit down with them and have conversations, and you still hear them come up every now and then like, We have some doorway pages we’re taking down, and we re just going to focus on optimizing our individual website pages, and so on.

Loren Baker: “We’ve inherited doorway pages.”

Duane Forrester: Yeah exactly. It’s always mysteriously part of a legacy, which just goes to show you that it’s old. The implementation was older. It came from a time when, at first, we weren’t necessarily calling them doorway pages. It was just that landing experience that was customized for very specific things.

When we started seeing changes in the paid world, when the quality of the landing page started to count a lot more and the algorithms got smart about it, we started having savvy SEOs look at that and say, Hang on a second. There’s an algorithm that s able to actually look at a landing page and PPC and say, ‘You know what? This meets a quality quotient.’ Maybe we should start designing individual pages for SEO in the same way: with that very specific focus on one very specific message. Optimize the heck out of it. Get it ranked, and have it drive people into whatever it is we’re trying to do. Convert on a product, sign up for a newsletter, consume pages, advertising, whatever.”

Loren Baker: You’re more or less talking about a landing page, right? That kind of hangs off of the main site architecture on its own little dangle thing.

Are the pages intended to rank on generic terms yet the content presented on the page is very specific?

Duane Forrester: Exactly. That was one of those early stage, doorway development-type things. Then people start realizing, Hold on a second, we could actually do a lot of pass-through stuff. If my page appears to be super relevant for ski bindings, well then if it’s loaded with content from retailers to do with this it’ll rank well, and I will get that affiliate value from it.” Given the state of the algorithms, given the state of searchers at the time and their desires, it wasn’t a bad approach per say.

As with everything, there were edge cases on both sides where some people could have taken more advantage of it, and other people did take more advantage of it. I think what’s happened is, there’s elasticity to the world of online marketing, right? Where the things that are current and fresh today that we’re all working on seem to kind of emanate from the United States, for better or worse.

As everyone else, and this is even within the United States, there is a small group of people that are very, very intrinsic to the core of the industry. They are experts. They know exactly what they re doing. They re always on the cutting edge. They are able to guide clients. They are able to attract clients. They are successful with their own websites. Then you have another layer of people that are newer, and not quite as well-versed in all of the complexities of building a digital business and operating it.

They’re still learning. They’re still picking up on some of these tricks and tips. Unfortunately what happens is, when you go, or when I go out, when all of us go out that have all of the grey hair (or any hair in your case) from all of this time on the Internet, we re producing all this content. We re telling people all these things that work today.

Loren Baker: It’s funny that you bring that up. I have had updates pop up in my email from blog posts that I wrote three years ago, seven years ago, about buying paid links and buying blogs and stuff like that where people are like, How dare you make this recommendation? Did you look at the date stamp? I mean, come on. I’m not going to change it because it’s archived knowledge.

Duane Forrester: Exactly.

Loren Baker: You can update it but not change it.

Duane Forrester: Yeah, but it still serves a purpose for your business because people find it. It is an entry point. Maybe they disagree with it — they ping you, you have a conversation — there s still value there right? I think this is at the crux of all this, where there is a latency that happens with knowledge sharing.

I see this when I travel internationally. I go to conferences and I’ll sit on stage with folks, and they’re talking about things and I m thinking to myself “Hang on a second we were dealing with that six months ago or a year ago, and you’re talking about it like it’s the fresh new thing.” There’s a latency that happens — I believe it happens globally, and it happens vertically within an area as well. You ve always got some fast movers and early adopters in any given area, and they will have the freshest information. And then they have to disseminate out and people find those old blog posts that they made and so on.

Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic?

What ends up happening is you have people that are discovering these concepts of doorway pages. They make complete sense. Rationally speaking, if you re looking to grow a business and your goal is to have a retail-based business and actually drive revenue from affiliate programs or direct sales or whatever it is, the concept of the doorway page fits beautifully with that model. You’re looking at it and saying, “Search will only be a portion of my marketing plan. I will also do email list building. I will also do social media.” Whatever it is.

Loren Baker: If you’re setting up those pages for paid, or for email landing pages, it’s also the job of the SEO or the webmaster to prune and control things within robots.txt and the various Webmaster Tool platforms to make sure that s not being indexed.

Duane Forrester: Exactly.

Loren Baker: What has me kind of thinking about this is this is an extension of previous updates, right?

Duane Forrester: You have to understand too that, for Google, for us, for any engine to take an action on something, there has to be prevalence. It’s not because somebody woke up one day and said, “Do you remember the concept of doorway pages? We should probably protect the Internet from that now.” It’s not like there’s drunk superheroes cruising around.

Loren Baker: “I had this nightmare last night about doorway pages.”

Duane Forrester: Yeah, “Where do I apply my superhero?” Or randomly, “Let’s do this!” It’s not like that, there’s obviously a reason for it because for any work to be done is a significant cost to a business. Developers, programmers, program managers, marketing people — everyone is involved. We’re talking about human beings with salaries and benefits, and a hard cost to that business to make that change. They re not doing it because they felt like it, they re doing it because there’s an intrinsic value behind it. That’s how all of our investments move forward.

Now I think from a webmaster s standpoint, you bring up something that is incredibly crucial. A lot of SEOs have this thinking and it’s this throw it over a wall thinking which is the, My job is to get traffic here. That’s my job. Better ranking, more traffic, and off we go. I’ve done my job. The conversion stuff, not my thing. That’s not up to me, that’s up to the product manager or whomever, right?

The savvy among the SEO community will take on the conversion work as well and realize that they can be true heroes by taking a step in that direction, learning and applying. What we tend to have happen is a lot of people will look at it and say, Okay we re producing content that’s great, but there’s grey areas. It’s not like it’s a black and white photo that you re working with, which is how people tend to look at it. There are 256 shades of grey. You can produce a very rich diagram if you use all those shades of grey.

SEOs tend to think in terms of it s black or it s white — we’re going to produce the page and publish it or we’re not. Your point is exactly right. There are completely valid reasons to produce pages for any number of reasons: back up a marketing campaign, it works in social driving scenarios, whatever the reason is fine. But control that stuff so that the search engines are getting the signals.

Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic and sending users along without creating unique value in content or functionality?

Loren Baker: The thing is, Duane, I would not send a page that I put together for SEO purposes to my email newsletter.

Duane Forrester: Right, exactly.

Loren Baker: I would not use that page — an organic page specifically made for SEO, typical visitors, typical user experience — as part of a PPC campaign.

Duane Forrester: Right.

Loren Baker: I want to make sure that page and PPC or an email, speaks directly to that audience and converts. Then why would you want to do the opposite and open up those kinds of pages to the Google index?

The one thing that’s interesting that you brought up a couple times while you were speaking I realized that I have worked a little bit in terms of doorway pages, but not what I used to consider a doorway page, which was...