Are Hotel Vanity Websites considered a Doorway Page to brand.com?
-
I work for a large 3rd party management company and we use vanity websites to help us market our hotels. They provide us the ability to better manage our content as well as provide value to our customers versus the brand site. An example would be Vanity: http://www.hiltonmonterey.com/Brand.com: http://hiltongardeninn3.hilton.com/en/hotels/california/hilton-garden-inn-monterey-MRYMHGI/index.htmlBased on my reading of Google's guidelines I am concerned that our vanity site may be interpreted as such. Please advise if this is the case.
-
Hi John
Nobody but Google can tell you for sure - but if I compare both pages & check the guidelines here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html the site doesn't look like a typical doorway page:
1.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?
=> the user experience on the vanity url is better than the standard page on the Hilton side. The only moment when you lead your visitors to the main site is when they want to book2.Are the pages intended to rank on generic terms yet the content presented on the page is very specific? You're site seems optimised for people searching for this specific hotel - not hotels in general or any other generic terms
3. 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?
You don't exactly duplicate - you enrich the content in order to offer your visitors (and not the search engines) a better experience.4. Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic and sending users along without creating unique value in content or functionality?
This point is definitely not the case5. Do these pages exist as an “island?” Are they difficult or impossible to navigate to from other parts of your site? Are links to such pages from other pages within the site or network of sites created just for search engines?
Yes it is an island - but in that case you could see any hotel site as doorway page for a site like Booking.com when they use the Booking search engine.To be honest, I would not be too worried. The goal of this update to eliminate pages will low added value, that only exist to rank & to funnel visitors to the main site. The example you gave has a high added value, and you're not funnelling to the main site (apart for booking purposes).
Hope this helps,
Dirk
-
If a "vanity" web site is high quality, offers unique content, and that content is relevant to the specific search queries most accurate to the content provided on that site, it's a perfectly valid site.
If a multi-site environment was designed to have one company/business dominate search results for individual search phrases and if any of those sites created for that purpose are not unique enough but artificially designed to trick ranking domination, that's going to be a problem.
So that's the question - how high is the quality? how unique is the content? How helpful is the "vanity" site?
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
More Singular KW Targeted Landing Pages vs. Less Multiple KW Targeted Landing Pages
So my question is... I have a adopted a site which currently ranks quite well for some industry competitive keywords with a number of poor quality landing pages which specifically target a singular keyword. I am wondering if its worth merging some of these pages together into one authoritative, better quality landing page targeting multiple keywords (as the intent for some of these keywords are largely the same). What i don't want to do is jeopardise the existing rankings in doing so. The alternative option would just be to improve the content on the existing landing pages without merging. What are peoples thoughts on this? Are there any positive case studies out there where merging has had a positive effect? Any help would be great. Regards,
On-Page Optimization | | NickG-1231 -
If I am using Lazy Load & Ajax Technology then how "tools.pingdom.com" will consider website performance?
Hello Experts, If I am using Lazy Load & Ajax Technology then how "tools.pingdom.com" will consider website performance? I am not using this technology but few of my competitors are using this technology but still there performance in pingdom tool worst than my ecommerce site Little bit confuse please help. Thanks! Wrights
On-Page Optimization | | wright3350 -
Are Landing Pages Not Connected to our Nav Bars considered Black Hat?
Hello All, I have narrowed down our keywords and want to start building out landing pages around them. However, until we get a resource center up, they will not be associated with our nav bars. If I build out landing pages so that I can connect them to our AdWords and other digital advertising initiatives, will we be penalized if they are sort of just out there on our domain? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | LuaMarketing0 -
Help with the indexation of my page
Hi all, I have a problem with my website. When writing site:www.pinesapiensa.com there're no pages indexed although the webmaster tools tells me that the sitemap file has been processed in 13 May and the number of indexed paged are 21. ¿What could be happening? I have to mention that there are two domains "www.piensapiensa.es" and "www.piensapiensa.com" addressing the same website and there's a redirection from piensapiensa.com to piensapiensa.com but it doesn't work properly. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Blog.mysite.com or mysite.com/blog?
Hi, I'm just curious what the majority think of what's the best way to start a blog on your website for SEO benefits. Is it better to have it under a sub domain or a directory? Or does it even matter?
On-Page Optimization | | truckguy770 -
How do you fix on page SEO ?
I have been trying to push my foundation website in organic search results for competitive keywords , i have been not been so consistent in raking our website in top search results of Google. can some one recommend the guidelines and activities which can really push my websites to Google first page. More Info: about our foundation We are the worlds largest school meal run ngo in the world feeding over 1.3 million school children in India Wesite url www.akshayapatra.org
On-Page Optimization | | AkshayaPatra0 -
Web Page Refresh
Hi there, we redesign our Website, changing it for a jquery based version. This new design is much more usable and nice for our users, however the average page views for user decreased a lot. Basically this is due to the fact that once the user is logged in, it spends most of the time in the same Web form which is updated through jquery without refreshing it. We were thinking about adding a meta refresh tag, or ad some javascript for getting this task done in order to get the relation page views/visitor increased. Do you think refreshing the page every 4 minutes could be penalized by Google (or other Search engines) ? Which should be the interval between refresh ? Would it be better to make it very explicit (i.e. adding a meta refresh tag) or using a kind of hide javascript ? We want to increase the pageviews but of course, we don't want to get penalized
On-Page Optimization | | martincad0 -
SEO for One Page Websites
Hi Are there any SEO guidelines for "one page websites". I'm looking into the 'benefit' it might have in combination with exact match URLs. Many thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Partouter2