A great post today from Matt Cutts who is finally back and posting again!  Yeah.  We missed you Matt.  Atleast I did!  It is no wonder you have no time in your life with all the spammy sites you must deal with on a daily basis! 

Well anyway, the reminder was to avoid having doorway pages to your site.  Matt was asked the question (and its a good question no doubt) about doorway pages and what they are, and its good to remind people that Google will not index you with these doorway pages.  (or if you have snuck in somehow … they will ban you eventually.)  Trust me on that one!

So lets talk about what these doorway pages are (in my opinion-I am just one marketer).  Typically, they are pretty full of keyword spam in the way they are created.  You take one major keyword (phrase) and use it so many times on the pages and anchor it up to other pages on your site.  Sometimes the doorway pages are created in other directories (folders on your site), or in a sub-domain.  They can also be created offsite.  All of the pages look identical (usually all doorway pages are template made) but switch out a keyword (phrase) …

How do you know the difference between a good optimized page (going after certain keywords) and a doorway page?  Provide GOOD content.  Most of the doorway pages are identical except for the keyword (phrase) they are going after.  If you want to show Googlebot you are the most relevant site (for the phrase), then create a page with good content and link up the right words to the right pages of your site.  (AND SWITCH UP THE CONTENT!)

A good example on doorway pages can be found on Matt Cutts blog if you want to read more about this topic.

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Something I have noticed lately when reading articles, and press releases is how wrong people are using the URL’s they are allowed to promote thier website.  This is what I wanted to post about today.

Most article submission websites (as well as places to submit press releases) will not allow you to use anchor text without spending some extra money, but they will allow you to include a URL and in some cases a deeper linking URL.  How can you take advantage of this as a search engine marketer?  Several ways,  let me go into detail.

First understand how search engines work.  They are always looking for the most relevant site to serve up as a result.  If you are letting them know that you are the most relevant site then you will have a better chance of gaining to search engine rankings.  How can we let them know we are the most relevant?

When submitting an article that allows you to use a URL make sure you place keyword(s) before and after the URL.  This allows the search engine crawler to identify keywords that are related to that page of the website.  FOR EXAMPLE:

“You can find information on what a memory foam mattress is at http://www.rockymountainmattress.com/what-is-memory-foam.htm .  Memory Foam mattresses ….. (and so on …. )”

So you see how the keywords memory foam mattress(es) were use before and after the URL and this allows the search engine to know that the page probably has information about memory foam mattresses. 

This is a great method to optimizing articles (and press) that do not allow anchor text, or a great idea when leaving useful comments on blogs that do not allow anything but a URL. (without having a spammy feeling to them)  Remember if you are leaving useful (related) information it should not be considered as spam (atleast I would not consider it spam on my blog)

Most of the press release sites that I use have free submissions, or very affordable $30 submissions that do allow you to use atleast one URL for every 100 words.  This is much better (price wise) for the marketer on a budget (as some press submissions that allow anchor text can run up to $650)  Well worth it BUT OUCH!!!  We are not all made of money here!

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