TIPS and TRICKS

Doorway pages

Doorway pages are pages that have been designed for one purpose only, to rank high in the search engines for a particular keyword and then direct the arriving visitors further into the site. Usually their design is relatively simplistic and includes a lot of text, but contains very little graphics or other fancy effects.

However, the focus on textual content doesn't mean that these pages are heavy on useful information. Their text often consists of the same phrase(s) being repeated over and over again or is just generic marketing babble spiced with multiple instances of the keyword the doorway page is targeted at.

Because of their unattractiveness and their lack of interesting content, it isn't common to link to doorway pages from other pages of the site, at least not with links the users can easily see. This makes doorway pages an one-way street - you can arrive to the site via them, but if you come to the site by using other entrances, you'd see no trace of the existence of these pages.

Why are doorway pages used?

Many sites base their designs on Flash, JavaScript and plenty of images. They may please the eyes of the visitors, but the search engines can't understand these elements and because of that, such pages receive a very low ranking in most cases. If the webmaster wishes to receive any traffic at all from the search engines, he has three possible ways of correcting the problem.

The first way is to compromise by removing some of the design features that aren't appreciated by the search engines and adding things that the search engines can index. This means increasing the amount of plain text on the page and in some cases can also require a complete redesign of the site. Due to the time and money required to implement such changes and because the search engine friendly version might not look as beautiful as the old one, many webmasters aren't too keen on selecting this method.

The second way is to start cloaking. This solves the problem without having to change the content seen by visitors. Unfortunately cloaking requires quite a bit of effort from the webmaster as it needs continuous maintenance in addition to the work involved with setting up the system, so this solution also has its own problems.

The third way is to keep the old design and add external pages that are specifically designed to perform well in the search engines - doorway pages. This is probably the easiest and fastest solution and that is why it is, or at least has been, so popular among siteowners.

What is wrong with doorway pages?

Because creating doorway pages used to be so easy, especially when using programs that can automatically generate hundreds or thousands of pages in a heartbeat by using a simple template and merely placing the keywords in the right places, many sites lost control and created enormous amounts of them.

The search engines initially tolerated this behavior, but as their databases started being filled with doorway pages they soon realized that these pages would quickly conquer the top ranking spots from normal content-rich pages. This would reduce the quality of their indices and lower the value of the search results, resulting in users abandoning the search engine.

So, what did they do about it? Took action, of course. Altavista for example begun removing doorway pages from its index and in some cases even banning the sites that were using them. Other engines followed suit and soon it was safe to say that the age of doorway pages, at least in the form we used to know them, had passed.

In the light of these events, I would recommend that you focus on optimizing your actual content pages instead of creating doorway pages. While that may be somewhat more difficult as you'll have to attempt to please both the search engine algorithms and the human visitors with the same page, it is certainly a less risky approach. If you at some point start feeling that you don't have enough pages and can't target all of the keywords you'd like to because of that reason, just create more content for your site.

While doorway pages can only be used to attract traffic from the search engines, a well-optimized page that has good content can get visitors from the search engines AND make people spread the word about your site. Talk about killing two birds with one stone, eh?

Content pages also have one other advantage over doorway pages - it is easier to get people to link to them. Link popularity plays an important part in many of the algorithms of today's search engines, decreasing the value of old-fashioned doorway pages even more.

Still want to do it? Tips on how to make good doorway pages.

I believe that the above arguments should be enough to convince most people not to make doorway pages and to optimize their content pages instead. But if you're not convinced and still want to create doorways despite reading my thoughts, at least do it properly. Here are some suggestions that should help you build doorway pages that are a notch above the creations of most of the other webmasters:

Try to make the doorway pages look as they were a part of your site. Don't include a "click here" link or use a redirect; instead, add your site's navigation menu on the doorway page and let users use it to get to your actual site. If you absolutely have to redirect people, always use an external JavaScript redirection script instead of META refresh tags.
Don't use a template or a purpose-built program to create your doorways. Create them by hand, your chances of getting caught will be significantly lower.
Make your doorways look good. Pages that have just black text on a white background will scare off a big part of visitors. They also stick out like a sore thumb and increase the possibility of your doorway page being detected by competitors who might drop a note to the search engine's spam department about your pages.
Attempt to include at least a small part of real content into the text you use on your doorway page. At the very least the text has to be readable and understandable, placing a mere list of random words on the page is a deadly mistake.
If you make doorways that are specifically optimized to match the algorithm of one search engine, use a robots.txt file to prevent other search engines from grabbing the page. If a search engine happens to find for example five versions of the same doorway page that are all identical except for small changes you've made to account for the differences in the algorithms of search engines, you can get into trouble.
Generally, I think that engine specific doorways are a bad idea and that it is better to start cloaking if you want to feed different pages to different engines, but if you still want to create them, a robots.txt file is a must.
Enough is enough. If you have to use doorways, limit the numbers. Don't make hundreds of doorway pages.

Remember that even if you obey all of those rules, you're not safe. You will have a smaller risk of being detected and banned, but it can happen. Don't say that you haven't been warned..