Do doorway pages really help?

[MidwestMerchant]

I was doing some reading and noticed alot of talk about doorway pages. Supposidly these are suppose to increase your rankings in the search engines?..How many people in here are using doorway pages? Also, how does one go about creating a "good" doorway page (if it really makes such a HUGE difference on your rankings)? Thanks in advance :)

[hannamyluv]

doorway pages are normally something you want to avoid doing. It had been abused so much in the past few years that they tend to be frowned upon by SEs.

It is better to have content pages. These are pages that you create, each with unique, helpful information written about the keyword phrase you would like to target.

For example, if you sell Widgets, you may want to target the phrases "buy widgets", "find widgets" and "namebrand widgets".

Doorway pages are thought of as pages that have the same or very similar text. So for the example KW phrases, you would have three pages with basically all the same text. i.e. "Buy/Find/Namebrand widgets at this fabulous place that I own"

Content pages would be where you write an article about "How to buy widgets", another about "The best places to find widgets" and another about "Why namebrand widgets are great". Of course all of these pages would be liberally sprinkled with URLs back to your website that sell widgets. ;)

Doorway pages are easier and faster and more likely to get you tossed out of the SERPs.

Content has a more lasting appeal and will also attract unsolicited links, which will help you further with SEO.

[MidwestMerchant]

thanks for the tips hannahmylove!

[graywolf]

I thought doorway page version 9.9 was upgraded to site-map 2.0? ;-)

When is a door not a door? [webmasterworld.com]

[PatrickDeese]

The reason that doorway pages help increase traffic:

in general they are autogenerated nonsense text seeded with a particular set of keywords, one per page.

If you get clever, you'd make hundreds of pages based on misspellings and typos, so if you are targeting widgets, you feed a generator dozens of variations and mispellings: widgt, widgettes, redwidget, wigdet, stuff like that - and 5 minutes later you upload these doorway pages and suddenly you have 500 additional pages that start pulling that once a day oddball search - but 500 x 1 = 500 more uniques a day than you were getting before - and could seem like a major increase, especially if you were previously getting 50 visits a day.

However, this is naughty and could very possibly .

A more "whitehat" technique is have something like "Common misspellings for Widget include: $A, $B, $C" on the page somewhere.

I, me - generally integrate the mispellings as if they typos in the content - although this can lead to "helpful" correction emails from your visitors.

The main appeal of a doorway page is that is a very fast way to create pages automatically. SEs don't like it because these aren't pages seen by the visitor - the visitors are generally redirected to the "real" page.

[edit_g]

Make each page an entry point that's useful to both the search engine and user.

(notice how I didn't mention the word 'door' there at all) ;)

[Leosghost]

graywolf ..;)..histogram?

[MidwestMerchant]

thanks for all the replies everyone!

[tommygunner]

Yes, doorway pages as most people see them are bad from what I've read. Your doorway pages should not look like doorway pages if you want them to be effective anyways.
Anyways that is what "Google Hacks Exposed" book says.