In my market, there is a site that has what looks to be a network of keyword stuffed doorway pages. Each page looks to be the same with the only change being the keyword term they are targeting in the header area. To me it looks as though they could be spamming search engines.

Is anyone familiar with this technique? What is it called and where could I get more info about it? I know for a fact it has a direct effect on google ranking.

To see it in action, go to westwoodrealty.com and click on the Realty 101 Icon on the bottom of the home page (see below)

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Lou Lynch
Associate Broker / Technology Director

Still pumping my Ulster County Real Estate website to be the preferred real estate website of the Hudson Valley.


Coming Soon! Mortgages.com (my new gig)

This website is not really what i expected when i first saw stuffing-doorway pages.., i was going to recommand that u report him to google but..

this is perfectly legit, even if i would recommand that "he" (your competitor) use 1 or 2 lines of unique text in each one of those pages, its a pretty advanced SEO strategy that rely on geographically oriented search to dominate a Specific Area, what you have to do is a little keywords research to find all of the suburbs that your potential visitors / clients may be typing in to find your service or product. or you can just use Wikipedia. for example for Columbus, Ohio you go to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus,_Ohio, (look at the bottom of the page), i think in most cases he just copied and pasted all the suburps in a custom made script that generated html pages with unique titles, Metas and descriptions. but you can also make those pages manually without any script. (am just explaining how its done generaly)

if you do this, make sure that you don't make the mistake that your competitor did, edit the pages and use 1 or 2 sentences of unique content to stay in the white hat area, because this whole thing is a little bit grey hat when u dont do it the correct way

if you have more questions about this feel free to pm me.

cheers.

They aren't doorway pages. They're just duplicate content pages... I doubt they are helping anything.

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---cK

CK Chung is an independent SEO consultant who provides premium Holistic SEO services, including services specific to Real Estate SEO. You can find his alter-ego, Kid Disco, spouting off on his SEO blog at SEOdisco.

Put real work into creating unique content for the areas you really care about ranking for...create good, quality profiles of these areas & work on deeplinking to these particular pages. If this guy is one of your competitors, you should be able to outrank him fairly easily with a little time logged in front of the computer.

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Eric Bramlett

Take your blogging to the next level. PM Me For a Free Self-Hosted Wordpress Blog on YOUR URL!!!

Austin Real Estate | Austin Texas Real Estate | Austin Condos

I'm interested to see what others say about this-- I've always wondered about this technique. It seems like it misses the mark but it looks like it's effective.

We do something that is similar in principle but implement in a completely different way:
* We have different apartment complex pages
* The layout of each page is the same, but the content is completely (completely!) different: different text, different photos, etc.
The layout is the same so that we have a portfolio and "branded look" for our site--- not because we want to trick the search engines.

Because of the interlinking through the menus, it's been really helpful in getting rankings for the "apartment complex name city" type of phrases directly to those internal pages.

I agree with Eric-- do what he did, but do it better by building actual pages with unique content for each community, and be sure to use a good internal and external linking structure for the pages, so that google knows what each page is about.

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Aubrey is the VP of Sales and Marketing for Trimark Properties in Gainesville, Florida. Trimark specializes in niche Gainesville Apartments and UF Housing Options for students wanting to live close to the University of Florida campus. For more information on the Gainesville apartment and rental market, check out
UF Housing: Dorms & Gainesville Apartments and the Gainesville Apartments Research blog.

Aubrey - the technique you're using is the "correct" way to go about it. Google doesn't care that you're using your template - they care about the content, which is completely unique. Great points about the internal linking.

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Eric Bramlett

Take your blogging to the next level. PM Me For a Free Self-Hosted Wordpress Blog on YOUR URL!!!

Austin Real Estate | Austin Texas Real Estate | Austin Condos

I just want to third the internal linking mention. It is something that too many people overlook when it comes to link building. External links are all that many SEO's talk about but the fact is that internal links can have a huge influence on your SERPs. You not send link love to your site through internal links but you also control your anchor text. I know this is not really a link discussion but I just wanted to reiterate how important and beneficial proper internal links can be.

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Mark Pilatowski
Online Marketing Manager, myClosingSPACE.com
Title Insurance
Title Insurance Blog

Wow lots of good stuff here, I was hoping someone from rew would chime in.

__________________
Lou Lynch
Associate Broker / Technology Director

Still pumping my Ulster County Real Estate website to be the preferred real estate website of the Hudson Valley.


Coming Soon! Mortgages.com (my new gig)

Well looks like the other guys pretty much nailed it

As far as your off page SEO, we can target the areas which you would like to out rank that site with your article submissions and provide deep links. Also we can write articles for those specific areas, and help you become more of an authority then they are with a little work.

Also it couldn't hurt to get an REW blog too and blog about those target areas.

Either PM me or email me at tyler(at)realestatewebmasters.com with which areas and which anchor texts you would like to use.

Better be careful, because I personally know one of my top competitors who got a 6 month whammy for doing that exact same things. At least the two of us are convinced that's what did it - maybe it was triggered as duplicate content, but I benefited greatly while one of my top competitors (and friends) cried for six months. My business nearly doubled and I took him to lunch often to try and make him feel better about things! By the way, about 3 months into the whammy, he finally deleted all those pages and slowly but surely made his way back up the rankings over the next couple of months.

Jason

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Kansas City Realtor & Relocation Specialist