Doorway Pages

    Here is yet another practice that you should avoid doing when you really want to rank well in search engine results.

What are Doorway pages ?

Doorway pages or gateway pages are a form of cloaking, which serves as a mortal sin if you are performing SEO. Cloaking ranks as one of the top no-no’s on Black Hat SEO techniques. Doorway site pages generally used as landing pages for most of the low ranking sites are pages that are created to rank high in search engine results for particular keywords with the purpose of sending you to a different page.

Doorway page optimization is nothing but a Black Hat SEO technique used to improve your web rankings in the search engines by creating a special page packed full of keywords and a link to your main site

As already discussed in earlier chapters, a doorway page is meant to be viewed by the search engine spider and the web user differently. If you by chance type in a search query, and you select a link from your search engine results page, a doorway page appears as a page with a little text saying, “You will soon be redirected to (another URL of a different site).”

If you come across a site like this, note that it was just a trick so that the search engine will list the site with a higher rank, when in fact, the site you are to visit is totally not the one you wanted to see in the first place. Sometimes, doorway pages are actually duplicates of other sites that already rank well with search engine results. Such is a technique employed by companies who think they can boost their sales better.

Doorway pages were intended to bring a lot of traffic to a website by misleading interested visitors. You should immediately report pages like this to Yahoo or Google. As you know, when you have informed them of the type of spam you have detected, they may easily remove this site from their listings.