Google Uses Doorways Pages To Rank In Searches

Today I stumbled across something you rarely see from Google. While doing one of the hundreds Google searches I do every day, I found an intriguing result. The search queries “Google sponsored links” and “sponsored links” gave this result:

On the first position, I can see a page from Google. What’s strange about it, is that this is the first time I see a page from Google without a meta description.

The whole page seems to be blocked by robots.txt.

However, it is indexed in Google.

To confirm this is not a temporary error, I’ve checked Google’s robots.txt and it looks like the page is indeed disallowed.

Considering the page is blocked by robots.txt, why is it still showing in SERPS?

If I look at the source code of the page, I can see that’s because the meta no index tag is missing.

To prevent this page from showing in search engines results, Google should have placed this line of code, in the header:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

It’s interesting to see how Google ranks ahead of numerous websites, for a competitive keyword (sponsored links), with a landing page blocked by robots.txt.

If you are curious to know where the link redirects, well, it’s Adwords.

Ironical, Google announced to update their Doorway pages algorithm just a few days ago. Here’s a quote from their doorways examples:

Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.

Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s)

That’s exactly what Google is doing. They are creating multiple pages to funnel visitors into Adwords.

Looks like Google is once again greedy by creating landing pages for Adwords. This is another example of do what Google says, not what Google does.

What do you think about Google’s strategy?