Doorway pages for SEO? Is it ethical?

[dakman]

I was doing some research on doorway pages to see how many sites use the technique.... I found many sites have a huge site map... you go to their site map or "more cities link and you'll see a huge list of states, and when you click on a state youll see all the cities. When you click on every city page they appear to be dynamically generated hence the name in the url.

When you go to each of the city pages they all look exactly alike but have dynamic meta tags and have the City as the keyword multiple times.. eg Looking for a home in San Diego?

and they have San Diego all over the dynamically generated template part of the "cityengine"....

It appears all the pages are a part of their site and are in the site map but is this an ethical SEO technique?

To see the proof also that they are using doorway pages the city engine represents 90% of there SE coverage check type in [snip] you'll see 89,000 indexed pages.... is this an considered the doorway page technique or what is this called in SEO terms? is it ethical and do search engines care? cause I may want to do something like this for a client...

[edited by: pageoneresults at 2:08 pm (utc) on Aug. 6, 2005]
[edit reason] Removed Specifics - Please Refer to TOS [/edit]

[ezyid]

No it is not.

[sarika mosaic]

Hi dakman

It's not always easy for a search engine to detect doorway pages so they might be good for short term search engine positioning purposes. However, sooner or later, good search engines will detect the doorway pages - or even the doorway domain- and remove them from their index.
The domain they were promoting could be removed at the same time!
So it is considered to be spam.