SEO GLOSSARY

What are Doorway Pages?

Doorway pages are web pages that are optimized for specific keywords but are not intended for human readers. They are created solely to rank highly in search engines for those keywords and then redirect visitors to another page on the website.

Key Features of Doorway Pages

• Very thin, low-quality content that only targets specific keywords

• Large amounts of repetitive keywords meant to game search engines

• Little or no unique, original text – often copied from other sites

• Minimal design and navigation – not optimized for user experience

• Immediate redirect to another page after a few seconds

Doorway pages are a form of “black hat” search engine optimization (SEO) technique that was very common in the early 2000s before search engines cracked down on them.

Why Use Doorway Pages?

The purpose of doorway pages is to:-

• Rank highly for competitive keywords by targeting them aggressively

• Gain traffic and visibility in search engines through manipulative means

• Redirect visitors to a target page on the site (often the home or product page)

Doorway pages help sites show up for many different keyword searches and funnel that traffic to where they want it to go. The idea is to essentially trick the search engines into giving the site a higher ranking than it deserves.

Benefits of Doorway Pages

• Can quickly rank for multiple competitive keywords

• Funnels “free” traffic from rankings to target pages

• Low-effort way to gain more search visibility

Why Doorway Pages are Problematic

While doorway pages may seem like an easy SEO hack, there are some significant downsides:

Issues with Doorway Pages

• Violate search engine guidelines and risk penalties if caught

• Create a poor user experience with low-quality content

• Seen as deceptive and manipulative “black hat” technique

• Short-term gains but not a sustainable long-term strategy

• Can lead to loss of rankings and traffic if penalized

Search engines like Google are very adept at detecting doorway pages and will manually penalize sites using them. Tactics like cloaking, sneaky redirects, and “stuffing” pages with keywords will almost certainly trigger a penalty.

Getting hit with a Google penalty can mean a site’s rankings drop significantly or even disappear entirely for months. It often requires removing all doorway pages and requesting reconsideration to restore original rankings.

Best Practices for Quality Pages

The best approach is to avoid doorway pages and low-quality content entirely. Here are some best practices for creating quality web pages:

How to Make High-Quality Pages

• Write genuinely useful, original content for human readers

• Focus on optimizing pages for topics, not just keywords

• Create content that engages and helps convert visitors

• Use keywords naturally and in proper context

• Follow on-page and technical SEO best practices

• Provide value, insight and utility to users

• Allow pages to be indexed, crawled and accessible

Search engines have become very adept at determining the quality of pages through advanced AI and machine learning. Creating content purely to rank is easy to detect.

The best results come from valuable content and a positive user experience. While rankings are important, the long-term focus should be on building trust and authority with both users and search engines.