As an experiment, I decided to simply copy my own websites in Google. Some of them hadn’t reached the top, but I believed in the content and felt it should work.
I wrote about this experiment on my channel back then and showed 1 site:
Rumor has it that doorways copy content from white-hat sites, rank higher, and cause the original site to drop. I decided to test this rumor and, without putting in too much effort, copied all my content from 40 sites onto expired domains from the GoDaddy auction (See also: How to check an expired domain for a Google filter?)
In theory, Google should have ranked the new sites higher or at least given higher positions to some of the content, while the old sites should have dropped in rank.
That’s in theory.
In practice, it turned out that… almost nothing happened.
Baseline data:
I took my databases and files and simply copied the files via the ISP Manager panel to a new domain + also copied the database and changed the site address in it. The result was the exact same design and content, one-to-one.
I deleted and did not renew some non-performing sites because I saw there was simply no traffic movement or the domain was banned by Google with 0 indexed pages.
24 sites survived to the end of the experiment, and here are the results:
In principle, 2 sites out of 40 brought in traffic, and one might say, «Aha, so that’s how doorway pages copy content and reach the top while our white-hat sites suffer,» but…
The original site simply failed to reach the top initially, due to a poor history or something else. Here are its initial metrics:
In other words, it was performing poorly and getting no traffic, and by putting this content on a new domain, Google finally decided to give it traffic.
This is the first site from the batch that gained traction.
Now the second one… on the old domain, the content didn’t rank well either, but on the new one, it did.
Here is the chart of the old site:
So I simply moved this content, WHICH HAD FAILED TO GAIN TRACTION, to another expired domain, and for some reason Google decided the time had come and delivered traffic.
It turns out that out of 40 sites, only 2 generated traffic, and even then only because the original sites had zero traffic and weren’t ranking.
Here is such an interesting story, and I don’t even know how to interpret it—I’ll let you decide for yourselves.