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They have been outsourcing doorway page creation/submission to the top engines for the past year.
The site rankings have gone up for the keywords they have submitted doorway pages for but I have yet to be able to actually find one of the doorway pages itself ranked in the engines.
Can the doorway pages be increasing the site's rankings for various keywords but never actually achieve a top and or visible rank themselves?
I am being asked this question now by my employers but am unsure. My understanding is that the traditional "point" of doing a doorway page was that the optimized doorway page could achieve a better ranking than the site for a particular keyword in a particular search engine and would thus act as a doorway/bridge back to the site.
Anyone have any thoughts/experiences to relate to this.
TIA.
Jas0n
I can't answer your questions because the only doorways I do are actually extra text pages on sites, graphics and all, that just happen to be geared to specific search phrases, or actual, visible, linked-up site pages on sites also geared to keyphrases but with a legitimate link to another site. Those rank where they are and stay put. Maybe the other pages will get benefit because of the link, too. I guess they're not actually doorways as such technically, they're real pages.
>The site rankings have gone up for the keywords they have submitted doorway pages for
I'm curious - with which search engines have the rankings for your pages gone up? And to be clear, it's your URL that actually appears at the search engines? The index page only, or interior site pages also?
These pages are put in directories on the site and the URL's for the doorway pages are submitted to the SE.
Over time (say from June 2001 to now) the rankings generally of the home page URL (the site uses frames) have improved for the keyword-doorway pages. I also sometimes see a deeper page (sans navigation frame) ranked in an engine. The main ones I am speaking of are Yahoo, Google, MSN, AOL, and AltaVista.
If I understand you correctly the "doorway" pages you are describing are helping the frame site become "somewhat" more search engine friendly.
A standard framed site is really only a 1 page web site (pages are "framed" on top of the "index.html" page)
Your doorway (non-frame pages) are adding relevancy to the main page (index.html) moreso than the pages within the site because the site's pages are linked to whatever your menu bar page (that is also framed on top of and not directly linked to the index.html page.
On the other hand, the "doorway" pages are a one page stand-alone web site (page) just residing on the same IP and the main site (assuming the index page(s) are not linking back to them).
Changing from frames to non-frame (or CSS) can be a major challenge, but reccommend if not submitted to [dmoz.org...] to do so. The listings you receive from here will add much more relevancy weight than the doorways.
Link fixed!
(edited by: Marcia at 10:22 am (utc) on May 23, 2002)
This is really the crux of the question. The doorway pages may or may not be helping. On the one hand our rankings have improved over time while using the doorway pages, on the other hand I have yet to see one of the doorway pages itself achieve a high ranking. The observable rankings are always for non-doorway pages such as the main URL pages of the main site, which makes establishing a direct "cause and effect" correlation beetween the doorway pages and the rankings more difficult.
During the whole period we've used doorways there have also been other promotional activites as well that could contribute to the site's increased rankings/popularity.
Jas0n
I recommend doing away with the frames as soon as you can... use CSS instead to build a wider array of indexable pages.
Depending on the circumstances, it seems that doorway pages do help the core URL that you might be linking to... as I understand, Google makes it a point to use those links as part of their ranking algorithm.
