Doorways pages are named appropriately because they are the bridge or doorway to search engines. There are many ways to deliver doorway pages. Most of them are being mass produced with software tools.

Here are some methods to delivery doorway pages:

1. Static doorway pages

The most traditional or low-tech way to deliver these pages is to create a static page around a keyword or keyphrase.

This page is the one indexed by search engine and also seen by website visitors. Because the visitors don’t land directly on the final page, they must either click on the link to get there.

This method is prone to duplication. Anyone can copy a highly ranked page instantly, modify very few things and hopefully get the same results. Search engines could penalize these pages for duplicate content.

Nowadays, as it depends less on in-page factors to rank on search engines and as the web page creation tool matures, this method becomes obsolete.

2. Meta refresh doorway pages

To overcome the problem with static doorway pages, the webmaster uses meta-refresh command to tell the browser to redirect users to the final pages.

This method becomes obsolete too as search engines no longer accept pages using fast meta refresh.

Meta refresh pages are also prone to duplication.

3. JavaScript redirection

Browsers are redirected to a new URL using JavaScript command. As search engines don’t read JavaScript, this method is more difficult to defeat.

It doesn’t mean that webmasters can’t copy the page though.

4. Server-side redirection.

This could be done by sending search engine to a specially optimized page while redirect users to the actual content by checking the User-Agent string and/or IP address.

As search engines become more intuitive, none of these methods are going to stay for long.

The way these doorway pages work is very similar to what search engines really want from webmasters and publishers. The problem is, these pages utilize junk content and useless information. They are usually generated with software programs, resulting in hundreds, if not thousands of similar pages. If only as a web publisher, we could write useful content one page at a time and mimic how these pages work, we could possibly rank for those keywords too, much more possible than these pages.

In the next post, I will introduce you to what I call information pages. It is not something I invented, but more of basic SEO and using good quality content to mimic how doorway pages work.

Just FYI: Doorway pages are also known as gateway pages, entry pages, jump pages, portal pages, landing pages, among others.