An Ethical Alternative to "Doorway Pages"

Definition: A doorway page is content created specifically for the purpose of garnering high placements in the search engines. Issue: Google makes the following specific recommendation: Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content (

The search engine that does the best job of delivering the largest quantity of the most relevant results attracts the most users.

Obviously speed, ease-of-use and "marketing" impact popularity but in the end the quality of the results counts most.

The best way for you to get long-term results is by "partnering" with the search engines. Partnering means recognizing and supporting the value-proposition that the search engines provide to their end-users:

Provide lots of highly relevant content

Follow accepted (i.e. ethical) search engine optimization principles

Is there an alternative? Sure, like many situations there are always short cuts and quick fixes that purport to let you "game the system." Instead of partnering with the search providers you compete with them. By "compete" I mean all the effort (and dollars) expended to chase their constantly evolving algorithms and artificially increase your site's rankings. These techniques may get you short-term results but many are considered the equivalent of "spamming" and could get your site de-listed. From a search engine providers point of view, anything that gets better results for sites with inferior content (and fit) is compromising their product and is temporary until they tune their algorithm so that it correctly ranks your site (down). One of these shortcuts is the use of "doorway pages." The rest of this article discusses the use of doorway pages and recommends an alternative approach. What is a doorway page? Doorway pages are pages of content that have been specifically designed to achieve high rankings in the search engines. They are often used by websites that don't have an abundance of content within the main pages of their site due to technology issues or design conflicts. They can be an effective tool for garnering short-term placement in search engine rankings when used appropriately, but doorway pages have been abused by websites for many years, to the point that they are frowned upon by search engines who now attempt to exclude them from their result pages. What does a "Doorway Page" look like? A doorway page appears as if it was built specifically to attain high search engine placement, and offers little value to searchers. It often has the following characteristics:

A lot of poorly written content, with an abundance of hyperlinked phrases in the body text

Copy that is stuffed with lists of keywords

Zero (0) in-bound links from other parts of the website Example: you build a doorway page named "targeted-keyword.html," but do not link to this page from any other part of your website. Google assumes no in-bound links exist because this page is of little value, and you want to hide it from regular visitors to its site.

A "redirection" that automatically loads a new page once the doorway pages is accessed

Bottom line: A doorway page stands alone from your website, and offers little value to searchers If any of those characteristics exist on the page, and if a number of these pages are created within a single website, Google is likely to discount their value, or worse, ban the site. If doorway pages are inappropriate then what is a better alternative? The "essay page" An essay page, on the other hand, is integrated into the main website (although not into the navigation structure). It offers real value to the searcher because the content is relevant and well-written. It often has the following characteristics:

Clean HTML coding with an HTML design similar to that of other pages of the website

A lot of content, with several hyperlinked phrases in the body text

Several in-bound links from other parts of the website Example: On the solutions page, you hyperlink the phrase "targeted keyword," to the targeted-keyword.html essay page.