You Can't Outsmart Google - How I Fell Foul of the Giant

I'd love to be able to tell you that I'm a internet guru and that I never make mistakes but, alas, I cannot. Sorry to shatter your illusions.

This week I made a rather silly mistake. In hindsight it was always going to go wrong, but I didn't think about that at the time - I was too caught up in the excitement.

In this post I'm going to show you how to avoid making the same mistake, and also how to fix it should you ever find yourself in a similar situation. The mistake? Falling foul of Google's quality guidelines and having a site removed from their index (almost as quickly as I got it in there in the first place)!

Earlier this week I discussed the benefits of an exact match domain name, and later reported back to declare the experiment a success. I needn't reveal the full story here, but I will so that you can learn from it.

Having a site removed from Google's index!

Today I noticed that the exact match domain I'd been experimenting with wasn't turning up in the search results any longer. I confirmed this with a sneaky little trick... If you want to find out which pages of a site are in Google's index, do a Google search for "site:yoursite.com", for example "site:onlinebusinessconsultant.co.uk". The site definitely wasn't there.

I then dived straight into the Google Webmaster Tools to try and work out what was going on. Google has published some guidelines which, if you build sites, you'd do well to read. In here I found out about something they call 'doorway pages'. I'd never heard of these before, though arguably I should have! BANG goes my guru status. Google defines doorway pages as follows:

Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.

Indeed - the exact match domain was definitely one of these. Shame on me. Now it's really important to point out that the problem is not with exact match domains. The problem is when they're used as described above. Google doesn't take kindly to being manipulated.

How to fix a doorway page...

So this is a little premature as I haven't actually fixed the problem yet, but essentially you need to turn the doorway page into one that that provides original content. Once this has been done, you can then request that Google reconsider your site. The request form is here.

There's nothing wrong with using exact match domain names (especially if it is for your core site). But if the point of them is to funnel traffic to your core site, then unless they provide original content, you're effectively creating doorway pages. You'll probably get away with it if you don't overdo it - and trust me, it isn't worth the hassle. Getting back in the index can take some time!