Doorway Pages

[sem]

Hi All,
I was hoping for some opinions regarding doorway pages. We recently had a company prepare 4 great satellite pages that we have worked into our homepage for better Search Engine Optimization. We have about 15 old doorway pages in place as well that redirect to our homepage. I have learned that this is a no no with search engines. My question is do I just simply delete these 15 doorway pages, do I put up a page explaining there no longer there if so are there issues with doing that? Help!

[backus]

The trick is to make the doorway pages not look like a doorway page. My doorway pages always work for me, except in Google. Fast just eats them up however. Loves them.

[cfel2000]

Do doorway pages actually hinder placement? Will Google penalise? I am looking into setting up a scheme of doorway pages. I have always found them successful in the past.

[agerhart]

It is like Backus said: it is the way that you use doorway pages that will get you in trouble.

What is a doorway page by definition? A page that is designed to target a keyword or set of keywords.

Well, all of the pages on my site have been created to target a keyword or set of keywords, but they are not the typical spam doorway pages. When designing the site and developing the content we were thinking about SEO, so we were able to effectively target our keywords without triggering any alarms.

[papabaer]

Good point agerheart, and as has been said before - ALL pages are potential doorway pages. I know mine are...

[conor]

I do the same. In addition, particularly on large dynamic sites I create doorways and link to them from a hallway page that also serves as a se and user sitemap.

[Tropical Island]

This is a thread from last March however before continuing with my plans I would appreciate some advice based on what's been happening over the last week.

Our site is located in an area where both the regional name and national name are badly misspelled. In the case of the regional name there are 5 major misspellings which according to my AdWords campaign are getting a lot of searches.

What I would like to do is set up a doorway (?) page featuring these misspellings based on our home page, We would then have a text link to it from our site map and the page itself would have the same outbound links on it as the home page.

Here are the questions:
1) Is this considered duplicate content?
2) Is this against Google rules?
3) Would featuring 5 mispelled words be too many?

Please, any help would be appreciated.

[zeus]

Doorway pages: If you have alot of pages with pur content + 1 picture and only on link back to the main site (still on the same domain/IP) will this count as a doorway page, they all have a link pointing them also. I hope its ok, thats the only way I can do that, but it must be because it is on the same domain/IP right?

[Tropical Island]

Thanks for the comments Zeus however it doesn't really answer my questions or maybe I just don't understand your answer. The content of this new page would be the same as the home page except in the titles and page copy everywhere the term "regional" appears I would put "reegional" or "regionel". Does any one see a problem with this?

[zeus]

well Im not sure either if you see the? at the end.

I think the only thing I havent got clear yet, in the internet business is crosslinking and doorway pages

[Jane_Doe]

I should clarify what I put in another post about doorway pages getting a client's home pages a PR0 penalty in Google. The pages I referred to that triggered the PR0 were computer generated garbage pages that just had a big link to the clients site at the top with keyword laden garbage text below:

==================================================================

Visit Widget World5

Old McDonald had a farm. We like beans. Vote for Goerge Bush. Buy widgets. Apples get picked in the fall. We sell widgets. Then when n night fell, Mary awoke and crept slowly towards the window. Get your green widgets here.

===================================================================

I think the term "doorway pages" might have different meanings and not all type of doorway pages are bad. I think the ones Google penalizes are ones that have garbage like this and/or are pages designed soley to drive traffic that are not a part of the main site (one way links only).

[Slade]

Generate some extra usable content pages that have your keywork mispelled once (maybe twice) over the whole page. Link to these from your site map, as just more info pages.

Using the exact same content as your main page could get you banned for duplicates.

[Beachboy]

Jane, so right you are. I know this guy who hired someone to make pages such as in your example. Around 280 pages like that, in fact. I couldn't dissuade him from that action and he is going to get zapped by Google.

I agree with the others, every page can be a doorway if you PUT UNIQUE CONTENT on it -- something that gives that page actual value. If done well, it is extremely unlikely that you will suffer a penalty.

[Tropical Island]

Thanks Slade & Beach Boy.

That's what I'll do. I'll create a new page with unique content using the misspelled words. It's just amazing how many searches are misspelled and how poor the content of the results is. Maybe with some luck I can get us there and save these poor unfortunates from further searching.

[ikbenhet1]

Once not so long ago when i did not know the rules of Google that well, i did this experiment, with a self made Quick basic programm, that i made, say to make a lot of 'doorway pages'. I designed the programm so, that on each 1 of the doorway pages it has multiple links to other doorway pages with my targetted keywords in the anchor text and some additional SEO optimizing crap that i found from doorway pages that ranked the higest at that time for particular keywords. Last month i stopped the experiment, removing all my linkage to these doorway pages, cause in this forum there was mentionning of banning pr0'ing and stuff. And since i was not getting sifnicant extra visitors also i thought stopping and building a GOOD site was the way to go. I forgot 1 of the links to 1 of these doorway pages (really it was an accident) and all the doorway pages are listed in this month's serp's. Some of these pages rank on the 1st Serp page where my 'main' page(s) don't. Now the point is not to do what i did. That I have sufferd no penalty would indicate, that 'doorway pages' still seem to be usable in google without getting penaltized.

So the point is Doorway pages are good.

[Beachboy]

Well, it might be a lot like robbing banks. Let's say you pulled four bank jobs. Yep, you made some money. But the reason you're in San Quentin right now is because of that fourth bank job.

[ikbenhet1]

you mean the fifth, you're not gonna rob the fourth bank twice are you?:)

[argusdesigns]

A bit of advice... Perhaps this will keep the threads down NEXT update. If you are building doorways pages, and content just to get hits to your site I would suggest another avenue. People have been getting away with it some of the time. Googles algos are googles business, if you cloak, spam or build false content it is only a matter of time. You have to keep in mind what the searcher is looking for. If they find your site through SERPS, and it matches your content...Everyone is happy. If a visitor finds your site through SERPS, and they have to pass through a maze of unrelated doorway pages, only to arrive at content they were not looking for...Perpare to be on SERP page #100. Enough said.

The point really has nothing to do with what is "okay" to do this month... As you can see wading through all the complaining threads.
It has more to do with putting yourself in the surfer's shoes and building good content.

[ikbenhet1]

I never said anything about unrelated, i tried to point out an example and it the result was:, you won't get in trouble making doorway pages. Forget i wrote it.