Standford Daily Pulls Doorway Page
Yesterday, news spread of the Stanford Daily’s repeated decision to host doorway pages. But if you check the doorway pages today, you’ll notice they are no longer live. (The pages are still viewable in Google’s cache) Back in May of 2005, the Stanford Daily stopped hosting doorway pages, but obviously for one reason or another the paper decided to return to their old practice.
AussieWebmaster discovered that the hosted pages were going through Maverick Insight:
The story gets more interesting. According to the Online advertising manager at The Stanford Daily “we only sell hosted content pages to one company” – they are Maverick Insight at maverickinsight.com – now they have their domain private so no contact info that way…..
GoogleGuy says he will be investigating the Stanford Daily’s doorway pages even though the pages are no longer live.
I’m checking this out even though the page is gone now, AussieWebmaster. Thanks for mentioning it.
It will be interesting to see how Google and the other search engines treat the paper. Back in March of 2005, WordPress was removed from Google’s index for hosting similar doorway pages. After removing the offending pages, WordPress was allowed back into the index.
–
Michael Nguyen blogs regularly at Social Patterns and is a search engine optimization expert for SEO Inc, a full-service search engine optimization firm.
