Define Doorway Page

[Brett_Tabke]

One of the long standing mysteries to most non-seo people has been just what constitutes a doorway page. What is your definition of a doorway page?

Machine generated?
Just another optimized page?
Cloaked?
Obfuscated?
Word scrambled?
Any page designed as an entrance point for your site?

[Hope]

Doorway page = A page designed to target 1-3 keywords or phrases. It is used to place high in the search engines and bring people to your site. These pages usually have no real content of their own.

Well at least that is my opinion of a doorway page. I am sure others will see them differently.

[Rockintom]

These days I consider a doorway page to be a page that resides within the main site that emulates the design of the main site with full navigation and is optimized for one or two keywords.
I look at an effective doorway as page that will allow the visitor to enter my site at a point that has the information and/or product that they are searching for.

[georged]

The way I see it, it's like asking 'what is a marketing campaign?'. It depends what you do with it. A well made doorway page can be full of fresh relevant content unavailable elsewhere on the site. Maybe the site is full of flash, maybe it's database-led, or in some other way the info is inaccessible to search engines. Either way, a responsible doorway page IMO helps search engines to reach a ranking decision about the site it comes from. A decision they would not otherwise be able to reach.
Of course, all this is idealistic froth, and doesn't hide for one instant that a doorway page is primarily to get a site ranked well; how you approach getting high ranking with a doorway page is a different matter.

[redzone]

Doorway Page:

Any URL that ranks on the first page for any word, that a competitor isn't on the first page for that word, and wants to be... :)

[Brett_Tabke]

That is about right rz. Everyone throws the term around, and rarely does it mean the same thing to two or more people.

I think the bottom line is a broad based, "a page intended to get rankings at an se".