I recently took on a new client and through the course of my research I uncovered more than 200 doorway pages that had been set up by his previous SEO company. Questions: Would it be best to remove all of the offending pages and redirect all 404 errors to the homepage? Or should I implement 301 redirects from these pages to more suitable content within the site? Or maybe there’s another way to deal with this mess that I’m not aware of?! I can't even believe there are still companies engaging in this type of archaic spamming. Thanks for any advice. My head hurts.
If the doorway pages are on your server, I would simply delete them all, then use a redirect on your 404 page. Search engines will eventually drop the offending pages. Doorway pages are the quickest way to get dropped. I had a friend who had xxx,xxx doorway pages out there. Made a killing for a little bit, then his site dropped from SERPs and got banned on adsense!
I ran into a similar problem. I removed all of them and 301 redirected them to internal pages that matched the keywords of the doorpages. Ranking improved pretty quick and the doorways started dropping off the SE's
Thanks for the advice. I guess I'm leaning towards the redirects because some of the pages have PR which I can funnel towards the rest of the site. I wish I could find a case study article on this though
You should remove that pages and create 301 redirection for most suitable inner page on same keywords towards matching contents.