Doorway pages and SEO: friends or enemies

Doorway pages, which often mistaken for advertising pages, have always been in question about their relevancy with regards to Search Engine Optimization. The various other names by which they are known are attraction, bridge and gateway pages. Their use has been a debated topic for a long time now. Some consider their use as bad or unethical while there are others who have full faith in them and consider them to be good.

Doorway pages is one of the strategies which have come into evolution as a means of rank building on the search engines. The idea is to create content pages with a lot of text and overstuff the content with keywords and key-phrases, thus expecting these pages to promote the website by ranking high on the search engines. These pages are used to make the visitor enter the site trough search engine results pages. These pages are not a part of the regular structure of the website with no navigation links for these pages present on the website. This is just about the basics of this strategy of promotion.

But do you think that this strategy actually works The answer is a big NO. For instance, with Google this technique is a sheer waste, as this search engine ranks pages on the link popularity and some other major factors. And as these pages are not seen anywhere in the structure of the site with no navigational links existing on them, these pages can never feature in the top positions on the search engines. So their use will make no difference to your sites ranking on the search engines, in fact these are a waste of time, money, effort and web space. The striking fact is that there are still a large number of webmasters who are still using doorway pages without evaluating its worth.

Another technique which is in fact just an extension of doorway pages is what is commonly being referred to advertising pages, these days. The idea is again to create keyword rich text pages somewhere to the tune of 20 to 100 pages of this kind. These pages are set up with JavaScript, so when a visitor reaches this page through the search engine he is redirected to the original site with the slightest of the move of the mouse. The pages are so designed that the visitor doesnt have to read anything at all on the page, because the redirecting process is very fast. Just a little movement of the visitors mouse would take him to the real website. The so called advertising pages are so much filled with keywords that the visitor would never want to stay on the site, but thanks to JavaScript he doesnt even have to read these pages. They just flicker on the screen for not more than a few seconds. The main screen will contain graphics like the website is about to open or you have almost reached. The text part is hidden below the viewable area of the screen. And these pages also have ample links on them but all in hidden form, just to add value for search engines screening. They are usually connected to each of the other similar pages on the site, and are mostly loaded with links, to rank high in terms of link popularity. This may seem like an effective and smart tactic, but this is not the real scene. Research has been conducted by various private agencies on the effectiveness of these pages, and the results have proved them to be useless. The search engines look at the larger picture and would rate those sites higher which are optimized throughout and not just optimized for 20 to 50 advertising pages.

The worst part of it all is that you may still not be able to make your website feature in the top twenty positions on the search engines. So what good is a strategy like this

It is seen quite often that such sites may be penalized by search engines and Google has already gone ahead to give some of these websites a zero page rank. So you may ask why people would want to do something that will simply add to the risk and more over when the method fails to get you any positive results. The answer is people dont do it themselves, in fact most website owners would not even know about this strategy and its working. It is some of the shrewd SEO companies which lead the website owner into this trap. For them it is simply a way to earn money by showing their clients the wonderful technique they have to optimize the site. The website owner may not know the actual implications and the results of this type of SEO strategy.

This article is to make the website owners aware that this short cut to success termed as doorway pages or advertising pages is nothing practical. Rather the high boasting SEOs use these tactics to earn money for no productive work.

If you want to search optimize your site carry out efforts through out the site. The base line is that irrespective of what these so called experts call these strategies, doorway pages or advertising pages, the result is that you will qualify for spam in some time. These SEOs may promise big, and may be for some time you may not be penalized by the search engines, but the question is for how long you can avoid featuring in the spam list with these over smart tactics.