I just read from a different forum that Google might consider orphaned pages as doorway pages. I have a site that the products change regularly, I use a dynamic URL to display the products. When the product is no longer availible I remove all links to the product from my site. However, I leave the product availible if you type the URL in directly, on the page I then make changes to say the product is no longer available "go here". This mean I have a growing list of old pages that are now orphaned. Does this look like a doorway page to Google?
It's a page which other pages DON'T link to, it serves no other purpose than to be a search engine landing page. It's not integrated into the site and the content may be repetitive. Doorway pages can be used if you are smart and build them into your site so that they look natural. That takes time and effort and will always be a compromise. One that is worth it, I believe.
By that definition, I am creating a long list of doorway pages. Right? On that line doesn't eBay do the same?
No, because I imagine there is a list of links from category pages to the auctions, and back to the seller and out to a list of items for the seller. I don't use eBay but I use a local auction site and there are any number of links to an individual auction - and they take good care to ensure that! Yes, you run the risk but without knowing Google's actual rules it's hard to know how strict they are. After all, the first time it finds the page it's integrated into the site. If you are worried you could always use robots.txt or the robots metatags to turn Google away from the pages.
True, but once the item is sold those links are removed, so the effectivly become orphaned. All referances to them are now behind password protected area, so they are not visible to the spiders
If other pages don't link to it then how could the search engines find it? I don't think orphaned pages can be doorway pages in the definitions I've seen since they usually refer to organic listings. Otherwise, it's just a landing page. A doorway page is a page that has no inherent value itself and is only used for organic search engine rankings and imparts little info for visitors. It usually tries to get people to go past it onto other pages by saying "click here" or something.
That would be difficult. I want the current products to be indexed. I leave the old prducts availible for people who have bookmarked or saved the url to view later.
Why? If your product base is in a database then when you change the status (either way) you have a script create a new robots.txt for you.
I have about 250-300 old product in the database, listing each individually would create one large robots page in a couple years. even if I timed out and deleted old products after a while.