When is a doorway page not a doorway page?

Can a doorway page ever be fair?

[Sammy Jankis]

A page is added to a site to aggressively target a certain key phrase but the key phrase has not been reflected through out the rest of the site. The content is unique and highly relevant to the site. The graphical look of the page is consistent with the rest of the site but the code has been stream lined to reduce the characters on the page. It is not linked from the main navigation but with similar pages from internal pages.

Is it a doorway page and if so is it a dirty tactic or a fair promotion technique? Essentially, is there a grey area between legit and dirty or is it black and white?

Thoughts?

[ken_b]

Any page can, and maybe should be considered a doorway page to some extent.

If a widgets site gets a lot of input from users or referer logs that indicate more info on blue widgets would be appreciated and they add a well constructed "blue widgets" page, it may well become an appreciated addition to the site. It may also become a doorway page if search engines see it as more closely matching a search.

I am assuming the visitors entering the site by way of the main pages can get to this new page fom inside the site, without any trouble.

If the new page is only linked out to the main pages, but not from the main pages, that may be another matter.

[Dante_Maure]

The content is unique and highly relevant to the site.

Then it will serve the visitors, engines, and site owner.

No problem.

[JayC]

Any page can, and maybe should be considered a doorway page to some extent.

Exactly right. There's nothing wrong here, as long as the content of the page isn't being misrepresented and the page is integrated into the site.

Traditional "bad" doorway pages generally are "orphaned" -- not linked from the site. That allows creation of large numbers of them without having to add links all those links from the rest of the site.

So this isn't a doorway page by that definition, but again it's more helpful today to think of every page as a doorway and optimize them all (most at least, there are some for which it isn't appropriate) to specific keyword sets.

Dante said it right: sounds like you're serving the needs of both visitors and search engines.