Competitor using doorway pages - what to do?

[tanglais]

Hi - A competitor for a company I work for uses over 100 doorway pages for groups of keywords to much success. Good SEO advice says that doorway pages will be removed from Google, yet this competitor's pages are still ranking first month after month, year after year. We have reported this to Google using their online form, to no avail.

Higher ups want me to replicate the competitor's doorway strategy for our site in order to drive more traffic. I've sort of hit a brick wall here. Advice on what to do?

[canadafred]

Tell your superiors that the creation of doorway pages, although sometimes successful, is an unethical SEO strategy that the search engines generally penalize and that your marketing tactics is a reflection of the overall corporate image; that you'll stick to white hat SEO practices and that you don't need to implement short-cuts that could be detrimental to your long term search engine marketing strategy.

[tigger]

what is a doorway - a page optimised around a keyword or term and if that page offers useful information to the surfer whats wrong with that - just because some people abuse the term doorway it doesn't necessary mean spam

I see no problems in doorways if they benefit the site and offer information the suffer would struggle to find in the site

[canadafred]

Hey tigger

Doorway pages are built for the search engines, primarily, in order to acquire ranking for various different groups of keyphrases. To the Internet visitor, one landing page suffices.

Doorway pages are intended to manipulate the search engine into thinking that there's a larger volume of unique content than requires being distributed on a larger number of webpages than what actually exists (1 landing page vs 100 doorway pages).

[tigger]

maybe its just a different viewpoint on what a doorway is - I'm not a spammer but I don't see a problem in creating a content rich page around a keyword - which in my books is a doorway

[tanglais]

According to both an SEO firm and Google's own critera (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355) this company is using doorway pages.

The pages have 4-5 keywords on them, are a few paragraphs long, and generally all 100+ link to the home page.

However, it works. And perhaps because it's somewhat niche, Google doesn't care. They've been doing it for years so and there's zero evidence they'll be penalized.

In a way, it's more gray hat, so in this case SEO ethics doesn't matter.