Undoing a Bridge or Doorway Page Ranking

[luxifia]

I own two sites in the same genre. I have pursued a strategy of having each site link to highly relevant articles of its sister site, thinking I was doing a good thing.

I have over 1,000 pages of content amongst the two sites, so I have ended up withdozens of such type links in both sites over the past six years. It was all done very innocently and all of the links go to super relevant artices in all cases.

Now I discover that I may be tagged by Google as a Black Hat artist by using Bridge page or Doorway page techniques.

My question is if I remove all of the offending outbound links on each site, will I be able to redeem myself or am I just screwed. If you were me what would you be doing next?

[dburk]

Hi luxifia,

Cross-linking relevant articles is not a black hat technique. Your article pages are not doorway or bridge pages unless the only purpose they serve is to direct traffic to another page.

In other words, if your articles contain information that is valuable to users then you are good. However, if they only serve the purpose of persuading your vistors to click through to a different page then you have indeed built a doorway page. The solution, in this case would be to rewrite the content to include useful information, removing the links would do nothing to resolve the doorway issue.