Doorway pages

Doorway pages are pages that have no other meaning except to rank high in a search engine and direct the visitors from the search engine into the actual site. The latter is done by using a "click here" link or a simple automatic redirection system. The only content on the page is usually a sales pitch with strategically placed keywords in order to make the page rank well for a specific keyword in search engines. These pages can also be cloacked so that other people cannot "steal" the page and visitors will not be turned off by it's ugliness.

As generating doorways is pretty easy and fast, especially when using specially designed software to create them, it's tempting to attempt to capture top positions in all keywords related and not-so related to your site by using a massive amount of doorways. This promotion method used to work in the past, but because so many people are now aware of it, several search engines have already taken action against the flood of these machine-generated pages filling their database. Altavista and Inktomi are amongst the ones taking most aggressive action; Altavista has completely banned huge amounts of sites that use doorways.

Because of the attitude of search engines towards doorway pages is so hostile, I would recommend not trying to make any and instead focus on optimizing your content pages. Using doorways might get your site banned if you don't know what you're doing - and you might get banned even if you _do_ know what you are doing. Besides, it seems that many search engines are heading towards ranking sites by using link popularity instead of complicated keyword algorithms, decreasing the value of doorways even more.

However, if you are determined to make some doorway pages, you should obey the following rules:

• Try to make the doorway page look as it was a part of your site. Don't include a "click here" or use a redirect; instead, add your site's navigation bar on the doorway page and let users use it to get to your actual site.
• Don't use a default template or a specially designed program to create your doorways. Create them by hand, your chances of getting caught will be significantly lower.
• Make your doorways look good. Doorways with just black text on a white background will scare off quite a bit of visitors and might increase your chances of getting caught by a spam filter.
• Try to include at least a drop of real content into the text you're going to use on the page.
• Don't go overboard. If you have to use doorways, limit the numbers. Don't make hundreds of pages.

Remember that even if you obey all of those rules, you're not safe. You will have a smaller risk of getting detected and banned, but it can happen. Don't say you haven't been warned..