The bulk of my site is a searchable database, so there is little "regular" content for the engines to index. Tell me whether the following is a good solution:
My site is a place to look up who awards points/miles/rebates for whatever merchants and/or products you're buying. So I created a bunch of "doorway" pages which are generated dynamically from the database, each page containing the complete offerings of one rewards program (MyPoints, ClickRewards, etc.). A key difference between these special pages and the regular ones is that these take no URL parameters. These pages have the exact same look (header, navbar, etc.) as the rest of my site, but are only accessible "directly", i.e. not linked from my main site pages. (You can see one at http://www.RewardsLookup.com/Programs/ClickRewards.asp if you're curious.)
Two questions:
1) Will visitors get confused if they start looking around my site and then can't find the exact page they arrived on? All the info from that page is on my site, it's just displayed slightly differently than on the "doorway".
2) Should I create some spider-friendly-yet-invisible-to-vistors links from my home page to these "doorways"?
TIA,
Kristen
(putting "doorways" in quotes here, because they're not exactly pages specifically optimized for SEs)
Kristen
http://www.RewardsLookup.com and
http://www.cancerdrugfeedback.net still under early development
Personal page:http://www.isd.net/kwong/kristen.html
Max posted this at 06:25 — 21st July 2000.
They have: 21 posts
Joined: Mar 2000
How do you create "spider-friendly-yet-invisible-to-vistors links"?
Cloughie posted this at 08:53 — 21st July 2000.
They have: 133 posts
Joined: Feb 2000
1) I would say that the doorway pages need to be fresh content. If they are a near identical page to the real site then the visitor will just get annoyed and think info is repeated on the site. Try and think of some fresh content that could go in your doorway pages... Perhaps a review of some of your services or just on your partickular subject in general. You are right touse the same nav etc as I think doorway pages should be kind of like a mini site, not just thrown together keywords on a page...
2)Why bother linking to the doorway pages ? ? ?
Are you going to host your doorway pages on you url.. I would suggest you use another url with 3 or 4 good keywords in, then you can submit the index doorway page and the engines will crawl the doorway pages... If you ARE hosting on the same URL (not recommended) you can't submit your doorway pages as you may be penalised for submitting more than one page from the same url... In that case it may be o.k to put a link to the doorway pages, but how would you do it ? If it was visible you would be driving visiotrs to the doorway pages (you don't want to do that !), and if you try and make it invisible the engines can also penalise you.
I just looked at your doorway page and its huge !! I would say 4-5 good heavy keyword paragraphs.. A pge for say acouple of services....
This link is good I think for explaining doorway pages...
http://www.irby-enterprises.com/search_engines/doorway.html
hope this helps you....
http://www.wannabebig.com
The Ultimate Bodybuilding Resource
KLWong posted this at 05:54 — 22nd July 2000.
They have: 135 posts
Joined: Apr 2000
To Max: I believe it is safe to use a link attached to a 1x1 pixel transparent image:
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong!
Cloughie:
Maybe a better way to explain what I'm trying to do is that I want to serve up my large database to the search engines in "slices", via parameter-less URLs. Maybe that's more confusing...hmm! The data on the page that the user arrives at does come from the database, so it is current and complete (hence the large size) whenever it is displayed. These aren't true "doorway" pages (hence the quotes), just SE-friendly data pages.
Any more comments, anyone?
Kristen
Kristen
http://www.RewardsLookup.com and
http://www.cancerdrugfeedback.net still under early development
Personal page:http://www.isd.net/kwong/kristen.html
Max posted this at 03:41 — 23rd July 2000.
They have: 21 posts
Joined: Mar 2000
Thanks KL, I've used that method before. I was just curious if there was another method, perhaps a better one.
JP Stones posted this at 09:41 — 24th July 2000.
They have: 2,397 posts
Joined: Nov 1998
OK doorway pages are becoming are and harder to do well with, the key is to make them more like introductory content (keyword rich) that just a doorway. Explain what the next page will do, why and how. You should not be doubling info as if you are you should reconsider the need for a doorway page in the first place.
JP
JP Stones
Perforated Edge - Tearing Through Convention
A UK Based Creative Communications Agency