SEO Doorway Pages
This news update from the front line comes from fine folks at www.seoconsult.co.uk.
SEO and Doorway Pages
Doorway pages on a website are the pages designed to draw the user through a page into the website. Just as a doorway can be inviting in the real world, doorway pages are designed to attract the attention of search engines and visitors, but have no real content so are not places people linger.
This kinds of page is on the edge of decent SEO. Some websites use them routinely. They are used at the entrance of a website in a way to welcome the visitor, a quick hello. This is what we are about sort of thing before the real business of the site begins. This is one of the reasons that large corporations use doorway pages, as they provide the same kind of imposing facade a real-world lobby can give.
A real lobby may look good and impressive but is of no real interest or value to the visitor, they want access to what they can for. People don’t enjoy sitting in lobbies. They’re impatient to get on with what they came to do, and see the real workings of the company. Lobbies can also make people feel small and unimportant.
Doorway pages are fine if you want to impress the average user with your importance. If you already have a reputation, and are regarded as an authority then a doorway page can add to the design of your website. It can also complicate your interaction with the search engines.
Doorway pages can be used for spam and as part of black hat SEO. As an example, The doorway page has been optimised for the phrase ‘SEO Ranking.’ The user clicks on the link in the SERPs, and comes to a page that features a nicely set out ad for SEO Ranking, with a link requesting ‘click here for SEO Ranking.’ This could then take the user to a link farm or any number of unwanted alternatives.
Black hatters also use doorway pages to boost their website’s ranking for a keyword by coding the page so that the visitor doesn’t even see the page before getting sent to the main site. This reason that doorway pages can make search engines suspicious, as the page maybe only been written for the benefit of the search engine spiders.
Why do some companies use doorway pages? Some big sites gain a benefit from a doorway page. Some other sites are tricked into using them as part of their search engine optimisation strategy. There are SEO companies out there that damage their clients’ reputations with doorway pages, because they produce a quick result for the client but in the long term Google say several times in its guidelines that the use of doorway pages can wreak on your PageRank.
When it comes down to it, doorway pages don’t help your website’s traffic. Internet users are increasingly suspicious of anything that doesn’t seem to be up front. A doorway page is another opportunity for them to click away from your site.
PS Sorry I had to rewrite some of it.
