There is a new “ranking adjustment” being added to Google’s doorway page classifier to better handle doorway pages in the search results, according to an announcement found yesterday on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog.
What this means is that Google doesn’t want doorway pages to rank in their search results. This is because there are doorway pages that maximize their search footprint by creating pages externally on the web or internally on their existing website. The goal behind creating these doorway pages is to rank multiple pages in search results, which all end up leading to the same destination.
This is what Brian White from Google had to say:
“Over time, we’ve seen sites try to maximize their “search footprint” without adding clear, unique value. These doorway campaigns manifest themselves as pages on a site, as a number of domains, or a combination thereof. To improve the quality of search results for our users, we’ll soon launch a ranking adjustment to better address these types of pages. Sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change.”
Anybody who has created these doorway pages will be seeing ranking changes soon, as Google will be launching their ranking adjustments shortly.