doorway pages

[pawel]

Browsing the www.searchengines.com I came across an article strongly discourageing using multiple doorway pages (pages with no content connected directly to your site, serving as gateways to the site scoring high in SE rankings). It says multiple doorway pages will be tracked by spiders and penalized in SE rankings. On the other hand, this is exactly what many SEO companies do. Actually, how can a spider know a page is just a doorway page and not a true homepage of a particular section of your site? After all, it has the required keyword density (that's the major assumption creating a doorway, right?), and meets most of the criteria set by, e.g. Google (it's not too big, plain text to the most part)

[chris_f]

Hi pawel,

article strongly discourageing using multiple doorway pages

I agree. I would not advice doorway pages AT ALL.

pages with no content

And that's the problem with them.

this is exactly what many SEO companies do

Two points here:
1. Just because an SEO company does it, it does not make it right. There are alot of cowboys out there.
2. On the other hand, are they doorway pages. It the pages have no content or indeed no unique content then this IS a doorway page. However, there is nothing wrong with creating a pages with a couple of paragraphs of unique content and a link to the homepage. This could be perseved as a 'doorway page' however, the unique content clearly shows that it is a worthwhile page to have.

how can a spider know a page is just a doorway page and not a true homepage of a particular section of your site?

The homepage is in the root of your site ;). Only kidding I know what you mean. I think I've explained that above with the words unique content.

Hope that helps.
Chris