Doorway pages are web pages created for spamdexing — a term used for the act of spamming the index of a search engine.

How is it done?

Introduction to doorway pages

Webmasters who create a doorway page insert results for particular keyword phrases with the purpose of sending you to a different page. If the page redirects visitors without their concern, then it is one form of cloaking.

These pages are usually visible only to search engine spiders. They contain nothing a typical visitor would be interested in. Human visitors will see entirely different pages because they are what visitors want.

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

The purpose of the pages

Doorway pages are usually created specifically for search engines, not human beings. Because they usually are very identical — often being copied as is from high ranking page with very little modification — they pose the risk of being deindexed by search engines.

Many pay-per-click advertisers are also using content rich doorway pages for their campaign landing pages. These pages may employ server side code to count click-throughs, visits, and other user actions for data collection.

The ethical side of a doorway page

The word “ethical” in this context is not really about ethics, but more about complying with what search engines want. Search engines don’t want webmasters to be able to control their search engine rankings but through transparent techniques.

Creating a doorway page is considered blackhat SEO. At the very least it falls into one shade of “grayhat SEO”.

This is obvious if you understand the philosophy behind search engine optimization. Search engines want to crawl and index real pages and do their best to return the best results for each user who search for information. This means it doesn’t include invisible or fake pages that serve nothing but to rank on search result pages.

Most search engines prohibit this practice. They are considered spam. Every techniques that are cheesy should be avoided because if only they work, they won’t stay for long. Plus, if your site visitors find this, your site could lost its trust.

Bottom line - avoid doorway pages

If you define doorway pages generally as those that lead to more informative content, then a homepage is also a doorway to more content on your site. Good navigation and site structure usually make your content accessible to site visitors, but without all the unethical-ness.

Others might argue that using these pages are okay as long as you provide real useful content on the backend. I tend to disagree. There is nothing that guarantees this practice. Moreover, there are ways a page could rank in search engines without having to adopt this blackhat techniques.