Possible Flame Bait, but an honest question: doorway pages

[amareck]

Got a question, and it may appear odd...but its not as odd as it appears on first glance.

What's so evil about multiple entry pages to freesites? I've been doing a bit of thinking...and Im sure Im missing something, and just wanted the clarification. Please dont reply with the canned response of doorway page arguments, im not a total noob lol...just figured this should be in the noob section since it will deal with a fairly basic concept of the industry.

In this post, I am a free site builder who submits their free sites to around 30 or so LL's, once per day almost religiously. I wish to follow all the rules, and want to "play the game fair". That being said, I also need to submit to more than 1 reciprocal table, because I need the traffic and exposure to pay my bills

Option 1 - Evil
If I were using duplicate entry pages for freesites, I would come up with something like this for a free site that I intend to submit to 3 "sets" of LL's (with a far better keyword URL of course!):

http://dom1.com/fs1/index.html
http://dom1.com/fs1/warning.html
http://dom1.com/fs1/index2.html

and so forth. From what I can tell, most LL owners consider these pages "bad" - they are exact duplicates of each other, barring the recips.

Option 2 - Good
Now, lets take a look at the alternative, the "regular" method of submitting:

http://dom1.com/fs1/v1/index.html
http://dom1.com/fs1/v2/index.html
http://dom1.com/fs1/v3/index.html

This is totally acceptable everywhere (or appears to be, again I may be missing something). So long as an LL owner can access the freesite by omitting anything after the last forward slash, they are happy.

Which side of the force Luke?
Here's where Im questioning what appears to be the prevailing logic....

"Good Option" dictates that for each site I do, I have 3 separate folders. Each of these folders is exactly the same, excepting a slight variation of the name of the folder, and a different recip table on the index. I do the following pages:

- index.html
- <keywords>.html
- <keywords>001.html (gallery 1)
- <keywords>002.html (gallery 2)
- links.html

So, doing "the right thing" I am producing 4 pages in exact triplicate. Under the evil option, I am producing index.html in triplicate, with a different name.

On my meagre understanding of SE's, wouldn't the "evil option" be better for everyone concerned? Less duplicative content, and the page that IS duplicated is MASSIVELY different on each occassion, due to the huge amounts of code that go into recip tables. I did a rough scan of 3 or 4 sites I'd built, and the identical code between index pages was around 15-25%. yes, the recips accounted for over 3/4 of the code on the page.

Please, do not misunderstand me here. Im not trying to rock the boat or cause problems, but it appears that the general rules of submission are forcing free site builders to trash any SE relevance we may obtain and pass on by way of our recip links. Im unaware of other reasons why duplicative entry pages are bad, so its all about the SE's right?

Im wanted to raise this question: which is better in the end for all concerned? Duplicate "sites" with 4x the duplicative pages....or single "site" with multiple entrances, each entrance being hugely different?

[DJilla]

There are reasons for things Luke that are outside one's comprehension until they have accumulated enough of the force to assist them suffice to say that your math isn't necessarily correct and plain ole "index pages" are nice and clean and everybody loves em'.

[amareck]

Thanks for clearing that up DJilla Here's me thinking that duplicative content = SE bad....ergo less duplicate pages = SE good! The lord help me, Im just not that bright!

[Halfdeck]

Duplicate pages do suck, and the current setup of submitting index.html does open things up for a busload of supplementals, which are useless for LLs in terms of boosting the number of backlinks and link juice via anchor text. But its a double-edged sword; if all LL SEOed the crap out of their sites, you have a less chance of pulling SE traffic yourself with your free sites.

[amareck]

as a side note: I should have used the word "mirror" instead of "doorway"....I guess Im just not that into the lingo yet

yep, understood half-deck thanks for the fedback. The reason for this whole question was that it appeared that LL rules were....not forcing...but resutling in a freesite submitter to either:

a) reduce possible signups from 30-40 listings to 8-16, by building 1 freesite and submit to 8-16 LL's to avoid duplicative mirrors; or
b) forget any relevance they may build on the back of their freesites, and submit X versions of freesites for "cash now"

As a side note, I chose item A on the basis of a long term committment to this industry. I wont be dumping any of the old mirror sites that were submitted Its just that I'll only be building a single site from now on.

if all LL SEOed the crap out of their sites, you have a less chance of pulling SE traffic yourself with your free sites

You're probably right here - Im no SEO guru. However, Im not after pulling SE traffic with freesites...I dont know how much that actually happens, but I daresay its a very niche occurrence But over time, keyworded free sites, on multiple domains, linking to a main LL will do good SE stuff eventually, if done right...right?

What Im looking at here....I have almost 150 freesites....I build approximately 6 freesites per week. I have 25 adult domains and will be buying more. Under my "old" approach of "freesite in triplicate", I think I was killing any SE relevance I may gotten due to massive duplicative content. Under this new approach, if I do the right things (thanks DD!), maybe I'll get somewhere for a niche or two within a couple of years.

[DJilla]

Originally Posted by amareck

Thanks for clearing that up DJilla Here's me thinking that duplicative content = SE bad....ergo less duplicate pages = SE good! The lord help me, Im just not that bright!

I'm sorry, April is one of my sarcastic months and you asked a perfectly good question(s) and I was just being goofy.

First there are a variety of good ways to efficiently create your folders and pages to minimize your fuss and allow you to submit to 100 LL's if you want. HOWEVER, even with an efficient folder structure you will still end up with some duplicate content issues. If you want to do things right you just have to change a little of every aspect of your doorways/mirrors/whateverpages which is not hard to do. Change the metatags a little, rearrange the phrasing on alt tags, move around and add or take away a few sentences of sales text, plus the recips will contribute and viola no more dupped pages. If done right, every one of those pages could become good SE food down the road. Down the road. It can take a long time before you can hone in on top terms in the SE world.

The reason we want index pages a technical one having to do with the order a page is loaded based on default extension, in other words *.html loads before *.htm if no page is specified. Index321.html won't load at all and looks phony. For more on this see:

http://pageplanetsoftware.com/mgiuse...aultpages.html

There is also the philosophy that says submit as many sites as you can, as fast as you can, to as many lists as you can and forget about em.

With the kind of numbers you've quoted and the # of sites your building and domains that you have, you're going to be very busy. I take my hat off to you for abmition. If you can perhaps find some good content management scripts to backend it all, you're on the way to a goldmine.

Good Luck!

[HarryM]

I've been using the one entrance per free site approach for a year or 2 now and have had very decent $ results vs time spent building/submitting overall.
If I had built mirrors and submitted to 60 odd link lists instead of a dozen or so I doubt it would make much difference at all and also as mentioned above, SE traffic would be more scarce. Most of all building and submitting one entrance leaves more time in the day for me to work on other projects and the link lists that i submit to (i hope) know that i havn't just slapped them on some random mirror page that's totally useless to them.
Well that works for me, maybe not for everyone and I know there's better ideas out there, I think it was MrYum that built a few mirrors but changed the text on them all, that sort of thing has to work too.

[MrYum]

Originally Posted by HarryMuff

I think it was MrYum that built a few mirrors but changed the text on them all, that sort of thing has to work too.

Yup, that was me

Works fairly well, but definitely more time consuming to alter all the text enough to end up with 3 unique sites based on the same set of content.

[amareck]

Thanks for the replies guys - very much appreciated....and nps DJilla

[tickler]

Originally Posted by DJilla

The reason we want index pages a technical one having to do with the order a page is loaded based on default extension, in other words *.html loads before *.htm if no page is specified. For more on this see:
http://pageplanetsoftware.com/mgiuse...aultpages.html

Actually it works the other way around on my dedicated server. Don't really know if that's just a config difference or operating system difference. I know on my home server that I can set any order that I want.

[DJilla]

Yeah.. that's true you can set any number of things custom at the server level. I think the above is just the general default all things being equal and I think it ends up being true more often than not but I may be wrong?