Noob - 2000 doorway pages, Fix w/301 or 404

[jraso996]

Hi All,
Just got back from SES 2006, had a great time and learned ALOT. Been obsessed ever since!

About 8 months ago I created about 2000 doorway pages to my site. BAD BAD BAD idea. Since our site has been around a long time and has done nothing else bad I think we were getting away with it for awhile.

However, about a month ago I said "holy crap, bad idea!" I need to fix this. I ended up 301'ing all the pages to my home page.

Now today I see that we dropped rank in our main keywords from about 5 to 22. Does this sound like a penalty? Would it be better to just 404 those "bad" pages?

Thanks in advance for your help.
- Joe

[FreeAgent]

I doubt you got hit with a penalty for removing your doorway pages. If anything you would have got smacked with a penalty while your doorway pages were still up and running.

If you had a small site to begin with, and you just removed 2000 pages you might have lost some authority on the keywords you were ranking well for. Also it would have been a better idea to 301 your doorway pages to other relevant pages rather then just pointing them all to the index.

Spending some time building relevant relevant back links should get your back in the top ten relatively quick if you only fell down to around 22.