Doorway Pages

SEO Black Hat Techniques: What NOT to do

What are doorway pages?

Doorway pages (other names include: bridge pages, landing pages, portal pages, jump pages, entry pages, or gateway pages) are poor quality web pages created specifically for the search engines. They contain little, if any, relevant information and are primarily intended to send the reader immediately to another page.

How do they work?

The main redirection method used by doorway pages is a meta refresh command which sends browser users onto the next web page. These pages are often easy to spot as they are primarily meant for the search engines and not human visitors. Since some browsers penalise those who use refresh redirections, some of these pages have a fake link which resembles a page on the desired subject but connects instead to an advertising page.

Doorway pages that send browser users to their website often use cloaking in order to achieve this. Cloaking is a usual method of creating doorway pages, which shows the search engine spiders one version of the page, and the visitor another.

What about content rich doorway pages?

Specialist doorway pages, such as content-rich doorways, are designed to win websites a high place in the search engine results without the need to redirect. These have a page designed to look like the rest of the website, with visitors able to see the usual links as invitations. No deception is involved at this point.

Many pay-per-click sites now employ content-rich doorway pages written by SEO copywriters as their ‘landing pages’. These can use counters to monitor the number of visits and click-throughs for marketing data purposes. Some search engines do not count content-rich landing pages as spam.

Why are doorway poages frowned upon?

Doorway pages tend to frustrate users who do not appreciate being directed to a site other than the one selected. The aim of the search engines is to provide users with the most relevant and useful search results. Deceptive practices, such as the use of doorway pages that designed to manipulate search engines, may therefore lead to the site being removed from their indexes.

Quote from Google about doorway pages:

“Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavoury or illegal content.”

(Coming from a “good neighbourhood” (in other words shared hosting that doesn’t also include lots of adult or spam sites) is important to help maintain good ranking).