1/30/2009
Doorway Pages and Landing Pages: What’s the Difference?
Doorway Pages: “Black Hat” All the Way
Have you ever seriously considered using doorway pages to attract visitors to your website and control where on your site they end up? If so, you’ll want to hear what the experts think about this very popular SEO tactic that’s frequently used by overzealous webmasters and perhaps even more frequently pushed on the reticent entrepreneur by profit-seeking SEO companies.
But, first, let’s define our terms so there’s no confusion about the type of page we’re referring to. According to Wikipedia, doorway pages (also called gateway pages, portal pages, entry pages, and jump pages, among other names) are
low-quality web pages that contain very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar keywords and phrases. They are designed to rank highly [sic] within the search results, but serve no purpose to visitors looking for information. A doorway page will generally have “click here to enter” on the page.
Here’s what Marc D. Ensign, CEO of Sound-n-Vision (a NJ web design and Internet marketing company) has to say about doorway pages and SEO in his article, Debunking the Top 10 Search Engine Myths, posted at SiteProNews:
Many companies will sell this idea of increasing your ranking by creating hundreds of one page sites loaded with keywords that link to you from various domains. This is considered spamming the search engine and is not recommended. If you properly optimize your site and focus on the correct way to get listed, you will increase your ranking much quicker than these doorway pages ever could.
The use of doorway pages
