Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamdexing, this is, for spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending you to a different page.

Doorway pages are Web pages designed and built specifically to draw search engine visitors to your website. They are standalone pages designed only to act as doorways to your site. Doorway pages are a very bad idea for several reasons, though many SEO firms use them routinely.

If you click through to a typical doorway page from a search engine results page, in most cases you will be redirected with a fast Meta refresh command to another page. Other forms of redirection include use of Javascript and server side redirection, either through the .htaccess file or from the server configuration file. Some doorway pages may be dynamic pages generated by scripting languages such as Perl and PHP.

Doorway pages are often easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings. Sometimes a doorway page is copied from another high ranking page, but this is likely to cause the search engine to detect the page as a duplicate and exclude it from the search engine listings.

Because many search engines give you a penalty for using the META refresh command, some doorway pages just trick you into clicking on a link to get you to the desired destination page, or they use Javascript for redirection.

Search Engines and Doorway Pages
Search engines all are looking for the same basic thing, which are good sites filled with good content. Simple. It’s not rocket science. There’s really no need for fancy doorway pages that redirect users to the “real” site, or other such clever tricks. If you have a site with thoughtfully placed keywords and key phrases, well-written content, and effective Meta tags, then you don’t need a doorway page.

Here are some useful tips that you can use in developing effective doorway pages:

• Keep your doorway pages simple and relevant. Doorway pages are created to rank highly with a search engine for a specific keyword phrase, and not to impress viewers with extensive content and fancy designs.

• Make your pages look professional and appealing. If a doorway page has been stripped of artistic content, it may be considered spam.

• If you plan on creating several doorway pages, make sure that there are substantial differences on their appearance. Doorway pages that appear to be identical may also be considered spam. This most often occurs when a webmaster optimizes slightly different versions of the same page to rank highly for slightly different keyword phrases.

• Having one of your keywords as your doorway page's domain name will increase your ranking with some search engines. If you are using this approach to get the maximum boost from your keywords, try to separate these words in your domain name with a hyphen.

• Go easy on the Meta Refresh tag on your doorway pages. The meta refresh tag that is used to catapult a viewer from one page to another, might also be considered spam.