Doorway Page – what is it?

Doorway Page

Business has its own rules, including the Internet. There are two general methods of White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO in positioning. Today’s topic concerns the latter area, which is not quite legal proceedings in the understanding of Google. It should be noted here that many methods intertwine and the border between what is acceptable and unacceptable is very thin. Another thing is the fact that the positioning of pages is generally a reprehensible practice, but this is a topic for a completely different entry.

Doorway Page is just one of the names found on the internet. If you’ve never heard of this concept then you can associate something with it: bridge pages, portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages. These concepts are quite niche and not used every day. The whole idea is to create a website positioned for certain keywords in order to get traffic. There is nothing wrong with this, however, techniques that are not in line with Google’s Webmaster recommendations are used. The biggest problem is that the user after entering the page is automatically redirected using the Meta Refresh command to another page.

<meta http-equiv = “refresh” content = “5; url = http: //example.com/”>

Doorway Page has changed over time and the emergence of new search engine algorithms. Currently, there are often pages that look normal at first glance, and only after clicking a link, for example: read more; the user is taken to an unwanted page. These types of pages are easy to recognize by the content they contain. They are created for indexing robots, not for users.

Currently, a lot of search engines do not allow you to refresh the page using the meta command. However, search engine manufacturers will always be one step behind creative creators. It happens that when a given page reaches the appropriate position it is replaced on the target server. However, this type of fun is on average profitable, because you never know when the crawler will visit the site and refresh it. When he does this, stating the target page will automatically have worse positions.

An example of using Doorway Page could be a situation where we have one domain with restaurants and a large number of pages indexed for various phrases, for example: Paris restaurant, London restaurant etc. The pages have the same content and differ only in the cities included in the key phrases. Despite this, after clicking on one of them in the search engine the user is directed to one page the same for all phrases. It kind of clutters the search results. This form is, however, still explainable, worse when the user is looking for sports shoes, and goes to the page with kitchen furniture.

The question arises whether it is better to spend time optimizing the target site than creating hundreds of subpages. As you can still see, it is still a used method. Apparently, its creators see better results for such a solution. Another thing to look out for is that a lot of these pages are easy to copy. People counting on easy success may be tempted to do so causing duplication of content.

Defenders are looking for arguments in the fact that many pages are based on databases and if it were not for such a solution their content would never be found on the web.