Are Doorway Pages Bad

You've probably come across a doorway page before when you were surfing the Web. Doorway pages are similar to landing pages except doorway pages are practically empty. Doorway page are created specifically to utilize search engine optimization techniques and search engine marketing to get listed in the highest spot possible on search engine results page. Sometimes the person who stumbles onto a doorway page will need to click through the doorway page to get to the actual website that they were trying to get to and sometimes the page uses a Meta refresh, or an HTML code that instantly redirects the reader to another website.

Doorway pages often use a sneaky form of SEO strategies where the text on the page has nothing to do with the actual product that the company is selling but uses popular search terms in an effort to get a higher search engine results.

Doorway pages are essentially a form of the old bait and switch technique. For example if you were looking for a site on natural dog food and you did a Google search for natural dog food and you clicked on the first link at the top of the search engine results page because the description of that site that is listed under the link said that page was about the best kinds of natural dog food. Then after you clicked on that link you were taken to the web site of a nationally known pet food manufacturer who was trying to sell you their new line of natural dog food. That company is using a doorway page as a method of search engine marketing. By using search engine optimized text on the doorway page the company was able to get ranked very high by the search engine spider and was able to draw you in with a search engine marketing article but instantly sent you to their page hoping that you would buy their new dog food line.

Because a lot doorway pages are set up to act essentially as spam and to use any method available to get a particular website to the top of the search engine results page search engine spiders now are on the lookout for doorway page. The search engines will sometimes ban pages that use doorway pages from being indexed or showing up on the search engine results page. Doorway pages that have an instant Meta redirect or Meta refresh are usually not banned by the search engine spiders. Websites that use doorway pages will often use a redirect so that the webpage will still show up on a search engine's search results page. Some website creators try to get around the ban by creating search engine optimized and content rich doorway pages but the search engine spiders are adapting are now learning how to spot doorway pages that are set up to try and attract web traffic using black hat SEO that has nothing to do with the actual content of the website.

Search engine marketing is a great tool and most play fair. For those who do not beware, the search engines engineers sit around all day figuring out how to stop the cheaters. If you stumble across some "top secret" strategy that someone is trying to sell you, be assured that the search engines already know about and have adjusted their algorithms to deal with it. Instead of wasting time and money, just do it right.

About the author
Terry Stanfield

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