Forum Moderators: open
My opinion - for what it's worth:
Doorway page (BAD) = useless (for surfer) page optimised and stuffed with keywords, designed solely to rank highly on a search term.
Doorway page (GOOD) = useful content page optimised for both user and search engine, designed solely to rank highly on a search term.
That's right, I don't make any pages out of any altruistic desire to educate the masses; only to get traffic or sell something. I think this is fine. It's a quid pro quo situation.
Professionals use to! ;)
The kind of "doorway pages" that are added directly to a site with content focused on targeting specific search terms that visitors will be looking for, that have the same look and feel as the rest of the site, are part of the rest of the navigation, and enhance the quality of the site from a user perspective while also improving possibility of good rankings, aren't the same thing. They're a legitimate use of doorway pages, not at all the same as the others.
Professionals use to!
Or: Used to... ;)
Any suggestions?
'Gateway Pages'
Their value is considerably diminished and therefore there are better ways to spend time.
Fathom's got it absolutely right.
suggy's answer is mostly sufficient. Another kind of bad doorway page is setting up a spam page on a different domain that is just designed to do well in search engines, and the idea is the person clicks the link to the real site. Perhaps we should start using a new term like "gateway page" to describe the legitimate use Marcia mentions.
We then created "Product Information Pages", broken down by (for example) Manufacturer then color, ect and nicely organized in a menu system. Yes these pages could have been done without from a user site, but they look very nice and give great information about these products! And now when someone searches for any of the products that we have added to the product pages, our Client site is within the first 12-15 results and gets 4000+ per month from Google. (also doing well on MSN)
A agree with Marcia, a page packed with keywords should (and will eventually) get banned, but clean "static" informational pages that benefit both users and robots are great! HOW ELSE CAN YOU GET A DATABASE DRIVEN SHOPPING CART WEBSITE RANKED WELL? :)
Recently one of mine "redesigned" his site and now his homepage is a blank page with a half page of keywords (one sentence....) that redirects to another page.
I just thought to myself, "Here's me concerned about the competition and then it does something like this! Lol - plain sailing from here on in, Scotty!" ;)
Personally, as a user, I don't like being redirected at all. I can accept a redirect if perhaps the page has moved - but landing on a page from an external site then you shouldn't be redirected at all. IMHO.
Scott
should you decide to take a different direction down the road, the company will then remove the pages from their servers since you have discontinued service. meaning, if you only had positioning on the doorway pages and nothing else, then they are gone... all of a sudden you are back to square one.
the risk of choosing an outside company to use "attraction pages", "doorway pages", "gateway pages" is usually pretty high. of course these shady companies dont care, they already have your money.
make sure you will be hosting the pages and own them even after the service contract is over, and follow the advice from the admins in this forum.
1) What is a good amount of text for a dooryway page for typos/etc of products/services you are offering? I've been experimenting between 50-200 words... just wondering if anyone had any thoughts on this.
2) Is there some limit to the number of these pages one should have? I fully intend on having some unique content on each of the pages, explaining the product and giving a URL to visit (also having the same look&feel as the rest of the website). These are legitimate typos and alternate keywords...
- canuck
i have my copywriters bring me no less than 250 words, depending on the font, layout and text size, this should not add too much scroll to the page while still allowing a good amount of readable text for content. also, it allows you to spread out the keywords you target without sounding stoopit. :-)
