What are SEO doorway pages?
Doorway pages are simple HTML pages, copied from legitimate pages, that are customized to a few particular keywords or phrases and programmed to be visible only by specific search engines and their spiders. They fall under the umbrella of Black Hat SEO practices, and go by many aliases – bridge pages, portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages and entry pages.
Content rich doorways are even sneakier and on a more sophisticated level of black hat SEO. Their clever designers make the SEO doorway pages appear more authentic and include standard links. They look like legitimate landing pages that are used in pay-per-click campaigns.
What are they used for?
Doorway pages are created for submission to search engine in order to improve traffic to a site. They have been discredited by search engines for a number of years, so you should be wary of anyone who advises using this technique to get results.
How do they work?
When a visitor clicks through a doorway page from a SERP, they’ll quickly and deviously be redirected to another page via a Meta refresh command. Since most search engines penalize for this command, doorway pages trick the visitor into clicking on a link to route them to the desired destination page. This is considered code swapping or bait-and-switch, which is done to keep anyone for discovering how the page ranked so well.
Is there any good news?
Rest assured, since most search engines won’t display more than two pages from the same site in the SERPS for a particular keyword, doorway pages are relatively easy to identify. They’re designed for search engines rather than humans. Also, they are often copies of existing high ranking pages, and this alerts the search engines and causes the doorway pages to be bumped from the listings.
With search engines such as Google, doorway pages aren’t always as successful as they sound. Pilfering meta tags from a “real” page doesn’t guarantee a doorway page will rank well. But even if it does, it could lose its position once the search engine’s spider visits the real page.
Tags: doorway pages, google doorway page
