Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are also known as as bridge pages, portal pages or jump pages. A doorway page is a keyword-rich, usually text only or limited graphic web page used for the specific purpose of attaining high rankings with the major search engines.

Doorway pages are often used by some search engine gurus as a way to ensure the search engines will find your main website pages and are designed to rank better than your original web pages. Visitors that are drawn in by the doorway page are linked over or “bridged” to the main content of the site. Most search engines assess ranking penalties against web sites that are discovered utilizing illegal doorway pages. Or worse yet, the search engines drop the pages from their index altogether.

An illegal doorway page has no useful, relevant subject matter (content) for a human user and is typically biased with keywords and other tricks.

A legitimate content page will have at least a few paragraphs of relevant content that meshes with the website's theme. For example, you can build a web page for each product in your website that summarizes all the features and benefits of each product. Try to write at least 150 words of relevant information and be sure it looks and reads well for your users.

Your main approach to search engine ranking should not focus on creating doorway pages. You should optimize existing web site pages whenever possible and get in the good habit of creating search engine friendly pages from the start. This always gets better results. If your site was developed in such a way that optimization is not really possible or effective, you can develop legitimate content-based doorway pages to help your traffic.

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  Michael Campbell