OK I am now deeply concerned.
I read with interest the new guidelines update and spotted the section on doorway pages http://support.google.com/webmasters...answer=2721311
Here is the story.
I have been involved with the internet for over 25 years so pretty much as it got going. About 3 years ago I setup a company with my daughter to make and sell products. In the market space there are some very big players but I have always been a believer in the internet is a good leveller and with a well designed site and good products you can gain ground and even overtake the big guys,
Well in my niche I looked at my main competitor and they currently have 2.9 million backlinks and 1.7 million of them are dofollow (source ahrefs) so I decided to concentrate my efforts on long tail keywords and also target locations such as "widgits in Oxford" as we do deliver our products to these towns with a better product and much faster than our competitor. The trick worked very well and for most UK towns we are currently in the top 3 for our main keyword + town with a lot in top slot and have been there for over 12 months.
I have also made ground and now rank in position 4 for the main keyword on its own but it seems stuck there for now and not moved for the last 3 months despite me working almost full time on the SEO side of things, I agree is not bad but as always you want to do better.
The line that concerns me is the following
Multiple pages on your site with similar content designed to rank for specific queries like city or state names
and the following
Google may take action on doorway sites and other sites making use of these deceptive practices, including removing these sites from Google’s index.
These town pages bring in between 40% - 50% of our traffic.
I could remove these pages and then watch our sales go down over night or I could leave them in the hope google do not de-index me.
Anyone any thoughts on this.