Moving forward with doorway page

[rsoeldner]

Hi there,

I've just started acquiring knowledge via BuSo and articles I found so-far. For the full picture, I'm also in discussions with an SEO company with the intention helping me to speed-up my learning but I also feel working with a community might be better.

I recently took over a doorway website (actually 2 websites but here I'm going to focus only on the bigger one) with about 62k articles in total. About 2k of these articles were created by humans (mainly experts) within the website topical area. The rest (~60k) pages were auto-generated with many product (which do not only belong to the websites topic) advertisement tables to amazon products.

Historically the website had a very nice visibility index according to Sistrix of as high as 20. with a very hard drop in March '23 (G Core Update). Still, the website is making some (low) affiliate based revenue.

(I'm not sure how to embed an Imgur image)
Mod Edit: Copy the image address, not the URL of the page the image is on.

My current gist is:

• Topical relevance is very important (currently not given)
• Too many affiliate link are bad (this is also the case here)
• There are other options for making an income Digital Strategy Crash Course - Day 9 (currently 99% Amazon affiliate)
• The amount of pages is not suitable for manual modifications

I currently do see several options going forward:

1. Keep the page running without major changes (its still profitable) and focus on a fresh project
2. Remove the product related affiliate articles entirely, concentrate on the quality articles and once they again have more traffic, seek monetization ways
3. Rework the product related pages and not only focus on Amazon

To add some more numbers:

• last 30 days on Amazon was ~17k clicks with a conversion of 5% which makes around 1000 USD.
• Additionally there have been several guest posts happening on that site with a similar amount

Sistrix is highlighting over 20k ranked keywords (top 100) for this website with only ~20 in the top 10. The backlink profile counts ~1.1k domains with ~10k links from ~600 IPs with only a few high visibility (< 10) domains such as wikipedia.

I value feedback, ideas, comments, links to content, ... a lot. Let me know if you want additional information.

 

[Ryuzaki]

My advice would be to spend zero time on this site. I'd keep it online and let it pay for itself and make some profit, and move on to new ventures. What you're seeing isn't unique at all. This was the fate of nearly all "content sites" over the past couple years... A near total 99.9% destruction.

Google has made it clear that they have zero intention of rolling back these changes. Some people have been waiting for 2-3 years now, hoping for a return back to the golden days. It's not coming. Every update Google only further entrenches itself into this pattern, and the message is clear: "Content sites aren't welcome and we don't need you. We took your content and remixed with with AI and now would rather feed users AI answers. We don't want to be a website search engine, we want to be an AI answer engine."

Once a site is classified in this way, it's over. There's been a grand total of zero recoveries. So the move is, if you intend to continue with SEO, is to find out which types of sites aren't being classified in this manner. SaaS, eCom, and local businesses all escaped, for example. One idea would be to take a legit local business and offer them a small revenue share (10%?) to let you build a blog on their domain and generate display ad revenue. But who knows at one point the scales tip and it gets smacked too.

This is a very rough time where a lot of people are having to find the next thing to get into after they spent over a decade on content sites. It's not the time to go into them or double down on them.

 

[rsoeldner]

Although I dislike the information, I appreciate the statements.
(Small addition: I've just checked Ahrefs DR: 53 of my site)

My advice would be to spend zero time on this site.

Just to confirm, zero time means zero time; no content update etc as there is basically no chance for recovery. Correct?

Every update Google only further entrenches itself into this pattern, and the message is clear: "Content sites aren't welcome and we don't need you. We took your content and remixed with with AI and now would rather feed users AI answers. We don't want to be a website search engine, we want to be an AI answer engine."

That makes a lot of sense and I wasn't aware of this shift. In my niche, there are quite a few sites that still have high visibility, such as this one:

Would you say it's probably a combination of the mentioned factors (doorway, no clear topic, ...)?

Once a site is classified in this way, it's over.

What do you mean here, a domain? My interpretation of the statement is: Once a website is being classified (algorithmically) as a content-site (+ doorway), its somehow marked in G database?

There's been a grand total of zero recoveries. So the move is, if you intend to continue with SEO, is to find out which types of sites aren't being classified in this manner.

I've seen such a statement across the big G Update that was hitting my site too. The mentioned SEO company believes in a potential recovery once:

1. content is being updated (better optimization through the use of PageOptimizerPro)
2. clear topical outline\page structure (remove of affiliate links to a topic unrelated to mine)
3. better backlink profile

The problem here is, the service will cause significant amount of money and my gut feeling is not very optimistic as I'm reading more and more.

SaaS, eCom, and local businesses all escaped, for example.

In other words: These type of websites seem to still rank well following similar\standard SEO patterns and are more suited for (current) G developments compared to content-pages, which G probably consume to build up their own resources?

This is a very rough time where a lot of people are having to find the next thing to get into after they spent over a decade on content sites. It's not the time to go into them or double down on them.

I appreciate the honest feedback, thank you!

 

[Ryuzaki]

The mentioned SEO company believes in a potential recovery once:

Ask them to show you instances of recovery, especially ones they've recovered. The stand to make money here and are (and I mean no offense here) offering solutions to the vulnerable who may be more willing to believe in hope than in harsh truths. But really, they just need to show you that they've achieved it (or even 5 instances from out and about on the net of recoveries. They won't be able to, and be wary of any instances they don't allow you to verify yourself, and I mean drastic recoveries from the 99% traffic devastation).

(Small addition: I've just checked Ahrefs DR: 53 of my site)

One of mine was in the mid 50's too, with links from all of the major magazines, TV shows, all that. Didn't matter one bit. The backlinks don't come into consideration here. It's, in my opinion, a whitelist of a handful of big umbrella company sites (Dot Dash Meredith's sites being one example) that were allowed to survive. Everyone else were crushed to dust.

I banged this drum for 3 years and some people got snooty and said that they'd survived and they were god-SEO's (and some were lying even though some of us they'd worked with in private could see their organic traffic charts going down). And I told them to wait. And they got crushed and either never came back or came back to blame us in some fashion. That site you showed above has a clear downward trend, and it's only a matter of time. There's very few survivors left, and they're dead men walking.

Just to confirm, zero time means zero time; no content update etc as there is basically no chance for recovery. Correct?

This is just my opinion, but yes. And I've been on this case / banging the conclusion drum since 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and so on here, and have been sadly correct. The cheese has moved, as mentioned in a couple of those links. I just don't want anyone losing any more time or money, especially not to sheisters. The gold diggers and the shovel sellers both were destroyed, and it's the shovel sellers who can still be unscrupulous hucksters.

Would you say it's probably a combination of the mentioned factors (doorway, no clear topic, ...)?

I'm flat out saying that for decades Google, with all of its brilliant PhD geniuses continued to lose the war against us SEO's and never could get a fair win and resented it. And when AI is threatening their entire business model, and they realized they had to shift to become an Answer Engine, they took an unfair, war-crime-worthy kill shot at Content-based SEO's and Affiliate marketing SEO's, just to satisfy their own inadequacies.

They didn't just quit the game and take their ball home. They shut off the stadium lights and brought in dump trucks of sand and manure to pour on the playing field. It has nothing to do with any "this or that". It has to do with a vendetta and a simple classification of websites as content sites or not. And while it's algorithmic, it's not honest, and there's no fix to get out of it. People are spinning up new content sites, doing okay, and then getting smacked with 99% traffic drops, on fresh clean sites where they did everything above board.

I'm trying to tell the people here that the expectation of there being a fix because there always was some kind of fix isn't really applicable here. The "Helpful Content Update" is a fake name to hide the fact that they're deeming everyone but like 50 domains as unhelpful.

What do you mean here, a domain? My interpretation of the statement is: Once a website is being classified (algorithmically) as a content-site (+ doorway), its somehow marked in G database?

It's most likely attached to the domain and could be reassessed when a new site is built on it, but I wouldn't count on it at this point. The temptation is to repurpose all of our DR50+ sites into new "types" of sites, but then you have to 301 redirect all of the inner pages somewhere to retain that link juice. And the 301 is going pass the bad signals too.

Who knows how often Google is going to re-run a "template based reclassifier" or whatever on a site. Maybe seeing a completely new set of HTML would trigger them to do it. It'd be a worthy test for someone to do, but I wouldn't get too far into my marketing or anything until I saw proof of life. And I've not heard of a single person do this yet, and there's millions of us out there testing.

 

[rsoeldner]

great explanation. I've reached out to the SEO company asking for specific details. I will update this thread once I get significant feedback worth sharing.

I've directly ordered the Who Moved my Cheese by Spencer Johnson, it feels very relevant to my way of working

The temptation is to repurpose all of our DR50+ sites into new "types" of sites, but then you have to 301 redirect all of the inner pages somewhere to retain that link juice. And the 301 is going pass the bad signals too.

The primary backlinks go to the "human" content (the quality sites). I wonder if it's worth removing the doorway pages entirely from this domain and try ranking the remaining ~2k articles by optimizing these using PageOptimizerPro (for example) and try making some money using adsense. This feels low effort and could be time-boxed by a month or so.

It still feels a lot like running behind the cheese.

What would be new "types" in particular, online shops for example? I wonder if it's a better approach or if the domain is negatively impacted and its worth to concentrate on entirely new stuff.