Non-existant Doorway pages

[doclove]

I know that doorway pages are bad, but my partner hired an SEO firm years ago who recommended doorway pages. We just moved our site to a new domain and in the process I deleted all of the doorway pages. However, it appears that some pages might still be linking to them since the googlebot is trying to index those pages. Since the pages don't exist it is returning a 404 error, however the pages appear in the google index when I do a search on site:mydomain.com. These pages have no title or description.

My question is will these non-existing doorway pages hurt us in the Google rankings? Is it normal for Google to index pages that return a 404?

Thanks for your help.

[emils]

I know that doorway pages are bad, but my partner hired an SEO firm years ago who recommended doorway pages. We just moved our site to a new domain and in the process I deleted all of the doorway pages. However, it appears that some pages might still be linking to them since the googlebot is trying to index those pages. Since the pages don't exist it is returning a 404 error, however the pages appear in the google index when I do a search on site:mydomain.com. These pages have no title or description.

My question is will these non-existing doorway pages hurt us in the Google rankings? Is it normal for Google to index pages that return a 404?

Thanks for your help.

It is not clear to me if the doorways Google are looking for are on the old domain or on the new one as well. But anyway - generally speaking - get rid of the doorways or you're going to upset Google, and probably other engines as well. Build content and proper inbound links with suitable anchor text, not doorways. Doorways are like dead since a few years ago.

As far of the other pages in google but having no title and description - that's because these are pages that google is aware they exist (found these links on other pages) but they haven't been spidered yet.