Doorway pages

Are they effective on ecommerce sites

[ffctas]

The more I think I know about SEO, the little I really do...
Do having doorway pages leading to product pages, and therefore the possiblity of higher SE rankings, outweigh the benefit of customers go directly from a search engine with one click to the product page?

I think I realize how doorway pages work. They provide rich content for the spiders to index a site and bring higher rankings.

In my ecommerce site we always felt it was important to get the customers to the product as quickly as possible ( a click right from the search engine)

Sometimes it is difficult to optimize a product page as well as it would be to describe the product in a non selling page like a doorway.

It seems as if a doorway page is more easily ranked high because of all the keywords, format, etc. one can design. However, the customer may be one more click removed from the product.

Any thoughts

[DerekH]

From h**p://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations:
<snip>
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines....

DerekH

[MrSpeed]

To get you "doorway" pages to rank well you will need to link to them. How did you intend to do this?

In the old day this was done via a "hallway" page which was basically a sitemap to you doorway pages.

Doorway pages are alive and well today except people call them product pages.

My advice is to do whatever you can to boost the relevant content of you product pages and to gain more inbound links.

You may also want to visit the cloaking forum.