Disclaimer: It is important to say that I do not have any connections with Decolar.com or any niche competitors.
Recently, the largest Latin America travel website, Decolar.com (also known as Despegar) has just been from Google results due to Webmaster Guidelines violation, resulting in a big buzz in the Brazilian SEO community.
The first tweet about the case was from Flavio Raimundo, pointing to the site:decolar.com Google Results page:
After that, the Brazilian SEO community has begun to discuss to figure out what happened to Decolar.com and at this point I started to think: this is a good idea to improve my SEO skills and learn more about Google Guidelines violations.
So I decided to invoke my Sherlock Holmes spirit to investigate this case using a simple checklist. Here it is:
Cloaking?
The first thing I thought: they probably are doing some kind of cloaking. I’ve used SEO-Browser and SEOmoz Toolbar to check their content as Googlebot:
But, as you can check too, it seems that Decolar.com does not provide any different content to users and Googlebot. So, I skipped this idea.
Meta Robots Noindex?
The next thing I looked for was any NOINDEX meta tag directive. As many of us know, this can be a huge problem, if you have any “malicious employee” that knows a little about SEO, and he/she simply add the NOINDEX value to meta robots, can result in your website be completely removed from SERPs.
Again, nothing weird was found.
Paid Links?
Then I looked to their backlinks profile… and this graph popped up:
I’ve used MajesticSEO to check their backlinks evolution and it seems that they’ve conducted a HUGE link building campaign. They’ve acquired almost 1,000,000 new backlinks since October 2010. The interesting thing here was not the number of new backlinks, but that they acquired those 1 million backlinks from only 500 different root domains – this looks weird!
One curious thing I’ve noticed is that, as Decolar.com provide services across all Latin America, they have a domain or subdomain for each country. On each website/subdomain they have a footer that interlink ALL those websites. This can be the reason that created the link spike.
After that I thought: if they were penalized due to paid links or link scheme, they were not supposed to be banned, but receive a “minus something” (30, 50, 95) penalty as JCPenney. So, I skipped this one also.
Doorway Pages?
Next, I tried to find doorway pages (poor-quality pages optimized for a specific keyword), and again, I found some crazy stuff: it seems that Decolar.com had two website versions – the new one, and an old version.
Into this “old version”, I found that specific “sitemap page” that have links to a LOT of pages optimized for specific travel keywords like countries, cities, hotel names, some pages focusing in “tickets + location” and some about “hotel + location”.
And this is one of their doorway pages:
If you are an SEO like me, you know that this is a HUGE mistake and it is a violation of Google Guidelines.
Why Banned?
It seems that this penalty was not due to cloaking. As far I could check, they were not doing any kind of cloaking, but, instead of cloaking, they are violating Google’s Guidelines in many other ways.
I’ve never heard about doorway pages resulting in website removal from Google but, this is the only thing I can point as the “main” factor. I know that paid links can result in penalties, but never heard about paid links resulting in website removal. So, in my opinion the doorway pages resulted in the website removal.
According to the Googler Pedro Dias, I was right in pointing the doorway pages as the main factor.
What about you? What violation you point as the banishment factor? Did you find any other problems / violations?
Hope you liked this post! See you!
Update – 03 of the March 2011
On March 1st, the Decolar.com SEO Analyst, Ando Amaral, tweeted that they were back into Google’s index. According to my post-tweet analysis they removed the doorway pages and now those URLs are returning 404 errors, as you can see.
I have to say that it was a good job by their SEO team into remove all the doorway pages and return to Google’s index in fifteen days.
About the author: Fabio Ricotta is the Co-Founder of MestreSEO, a Brazilian SEO company.
