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What are doorway pages?
Doorway pages have been used by many search engine
optimizers for improving rankings of their or their client’s
websites. There was a time when some websites used to dominate the
first 10-20 or in some cases even more top spots in search engine
results for particular keywords, although since then most search
engines have tidied up.
So what exactly are doorway pages? Doorway pages are simply web
pages that have been created with an aim to improve search engine
rankings. Doorway pages concentrate on particular search terms (keywords)
and are usually not a part of the actual website where the user
is redirected (using redirection code) once he/she lands on the
doorway page. Besides this, doorway pages serve no other purpose,
and hence the only reason for their existence is search engines.
They are called doorway pages because people enter the website by
clicking on their listing in the search results. It is simply a
practice where search engines see something and rank a page for
it, but what is actually delivered to the user is something different.
Doorway pages from a single website can no longer
dominate most of the top search results, and most good search engines
only display, at the most, two pages from a single website, but
it is still possible to get a site listed more than two times by
using doorway pages that are not located on the same domain. Doorway
pages can often cause search engines to show irrelevant results
to users, and hence using doorway pages is considered an unethical
search engine optimization technique.
Most of the present search engines consider doorway
pages as spam, as they are not interested in displaying pages which
are not genuinely created for relevant content, and hence if found
out they penalize these websites, either by delisting them or through
other means. Doorway pages were most relevant when search engine
rankings were based solely on the basis of page content but after
the introduction of things like Page Rank, and link popularity by
Google, the relevance of doorway pages for improving rankings has
come down significantly.
Why do people do it, and what are its disadvantages?
SEO firms use doorway pages either because they
are not competent enough to get good rankings using ethical techniques,
or as a time saving SEO technique.
Using doorway pages, might improve a website’s
ranking in the short term, but can have severe long term negative
impacts on a website, as most search engines consider it as spam,
especially when the content of a doorway page is not similar to
the content of the actual page in any way. If found out, a search
engine may degrade a website’s ranking and in some cases completely
blacklist it from its index.
Another issue to be taken into consideration is
the ownership of doorway pages, most SEO firms retain the ownership
of external domains where doorway pages are located, and hence in
case you do decide to opt for this technique it is advisable to
sort out the ownership of doorway pages prior to beginning any kind
of optimization.
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