Correct Use of Doorway Pages

are their guidelines to follow?

[JakeLD]

Hi,

I have a site that has tons of editorial content that is updated daily. We have 9 major channels w/in the site. I'm looking to create doorway pages into these channels.

Reason for this:
Most of our editorial content doesn't get spidered because the articles are so deep and the site is so big.
I want to do it in a way that provides benefits to searchers. I'd like to provide pages with different top level domains that have highly relevant content (i.e. those articles).

Two questions:

Is it bad to create these doorway pages?

Are there guidelines for correctly building these pages to prevent penalization?

[fathom]

You will need to define what "doorway pages" means to you.

In my perspective: a doorway is every page of your site, that is targeted to a specific group of topics and therefore the potential of ranking high in search engines so that a user can enter "this particular doorway", of your site, becoming a visitor.

Others will say that "doorway pages" are BAD! but define them as something else.

Welcome to WebmasterWorld JakeLD! :)

[tedster]

One characteristic of doorway pages, "old style", was that they were disconnected from site navigation - with no inbound links, or maybe one, but that was white on white :)

That pattern stands out for today's search engines and you want to avoid it.

A second characteristic was only one outbound URL, repeated over several links on the page but with varying link text. Again, if a page uses only one URL for several outbound links, then it's pretty suspect and some algos may catch it.

Fathom's got the right idea, I'd say. If you think of this page not so much as a doorway, but more as a potential "site entry page" with full navigational support for the visitor who enters your site there, you should do well.

[volatilegx]

JakeLD,

While defining what a doorway page is might be important, definitions don't really answer your question.

I think the focus of your efforts must be to create a short path to some of your articles from the home/front page of your website. Pick the articles whose text best matches your targeted keywords. Link to these articles directly from your home page... the way I'd do it would be to put up a section titled "Most Popular Articles" and list each article with a description which contains the keywords (but still makes sense).

This will effectively turn those legitimate, content filled pages into doorway pages for your site. If these pages are buried deep within a directory structure, you might consider making copies of them and putting them in your home directory for the purpose of unburying them.

Using a strategic linking plan such as the one above is not "bad" and certainly wouldn't get you banned or penalized. It just makes good sense.

[JakeLD]

Thank you everybody for your input. I now have a better understanding of "doorway pages" and think i have a pretty good plan set in place.