Doorway Pages back in the search results

[iJeep]

Doorway pages used to be a big thing, then not so much. It looks like they might be back.

I just took a look at some SERPs I used to watch regularly. The older domains are pretty much gone and replaced with doorway pages of sites. Clicking on most of these results takes you to a generic page asking what you are looking for, instead of relevant information on the topic. Also, at the bottom of each page there are about 50 small text links to other doorway pages on the same domain.

Has anybody else noticed this?
Isn't Google supposed to discourage doorways?

[tedster]

My understanding was that Google was mostly on the warpath about doorway pages that used an immediate meta-refresh or javascript redirect to take you somewhere other than the page that appeared in the SERPs.

When it comes to pages that gracefully accept the visitor and serve them the exact content that Google indexed, the definition of "doorway page" begins to get quite fuzzy -- and difficult to program into an automated algorithm. In a certain sense, any page with a menu for navigation is a kind of doorway page, isn't it?