Did Local Directories Get Hit By Google?s Doorway Page Algo?

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Did Local Directories Get Hit By Google’s Doorway Page Algo?
by Andrew Shotland
May 15, 2015

Andrew Shotland notes data showing a downturn in traffic across the board for YellowPages.com, FourSquare, CitySearch, and others coinciding with the launch of Google's Doorway Page update.

Perhaps SEMRush is still updating but if its organic search traffic graphs are even close to accurate it looks like May is the month that Google took care of all Local family business...

Barry Schwartz noted a Google Webmaster Forums thread on the subject where Google’s Eric Kuan from the search quality team highlighted a post that included the following:

An example of doorways is when you have a website with 200 pages on it, all of which have the same basic text but with place names switched out on each page (“Find a taxi in London”/”Find a taxi in New York City”). The pages are designed to rank separately, catch keyword searches, but funnel all the traffic to one destination.

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Jennifer Slegg at TheSEMPost reported last week that Google’s Doorway Page Update is live and is continuously updating. If this data is correct (that’s not always the case with these tools) then there’s a good chance these sites have been Doorwayed.

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