The Skinny on Doorway Pages

When someone mentions Doorway pages nowadays, you are likely to hear a "tisk-tisk" from search engine optimization professionals. But there is much confusion as to what exactly Doorways pages are. So let's step back and take a detailed look at what they are and how they are used.

A doorway page is an HTML web page created as an entryway for search engines (and therefore people) to get into your website. They are also known as gateway pages or jump pages . In essence, they are web pages that funnel traffic from engines like Google into the rest of your site.

When are Doorway Pages Bad?

Doorway pages are bad when they are used in an underhanded way to get visitors to come to your site. If they are created using web page "tricks", such as repeating a targeted phrase over and over, or coloring the text the same as the page's background, then they are artificially boosting their search engine rankings. Many unscrupulous website designers create these pages to fool the search engines into thinking the page has a great deal of content about the targeted word or phrase. For this reason, search engines like Google have made it clear that they consider doorway pages to be a big no-no.

When are Doorway Pages Good?

Doorway pages are good when they are simply created with lots of useful text that has the targeted key phrases naturally occurring within it. For example, if you have a toy store website, and you create a page that talks in depth about the history and enjoyment of model trains, then that page may rank very well in the search engines for the phrase "model trains". The page is acting like a doorway to the rest of your site, but it is full of useful information and does not use any underhanded web page tricks to artificially enhance it's rankings. In cases like this, such a page is in fact acting as a doorway page to the rest of the toy store site, but it is doing so by having lots of relevant information and not by using any shady tricks.

So what are Doorway pages? God or bad? The answer is: it depends on whether the web designer is using ethical and honest methods when creating it. If a page is full of well-written text that talks about a topic then that page has served a real purpose: providing useful information to your target audience.

But the truth is, "bad doorway pages" are really not very good tools at driving traffic to your site anyway. Why? Because since such pages are employing shady tricks instead of meaty content, when people "land" on these pages, there is little or no incentive to venture further into the website. Whereas if the page is carefully written and really provides people with the content they need, then that doorway page has nothing to be ashamed of.