Good for rankings or are they Unethical?

Doorways pages are HTML pages which have been customised with a few particular keywords and programmed in such a way that they can only be seen by specific search engine spiders.  Their purpose is to attempt to trick the search engine into giving your site a higher ranking.  Doorway pages are not aimed at readers; they are aimed only at search engine spiders.  If someone lands on one, they are immediately redirected to bona fide website.  Sneaky and as everyone knows, sneaky practices only work in the short term.  In the long run you might get flagged for reviewed or even censured which can help in damaging your worthiness.

Doorways pages are considered bad SEO.  If anything is invisible it goes against the philosophy of SEO practice.  Today search engine spiders are becoming more intuitive resulting in the ability to either ignore or ban doorway pages altogether and some search engines have guidelines which prohibit them.

Do they result in higher rankings?

Pseudo SEO experts will tell you they do, but only because they want you to buy costly software which benefits them, not you.  What this software does is spew out doorway pages which create clutter in search engine results making searching less effective.  Also, this software expects a lot of input from you because you have to come up with the keywords and are responsible for keyword density.  You have to fill out templates and add Meta tags yourself.  If you are going to go all that trouble it makes more sense to optimise the right way from the beginning.  Rather fix your site instead of settling for easy solutions.  You need to spend the time optimising each and every page on your website, no short cuts.

Search engines and doorway pages are not a great mix

Search engines look for good sites which are filled with good content in order to do their work.  There is no need for clever tricks, especially if you want to benefit from high rankings.  If your content is well written and has well placed and thoughtful keywords throughout and your Meta tags are effective you don’t need to resort to doorway pages.

Just by having a site on the WWW and have done some homework on SEO, your site will be found because every well optimised website has a natural entryway.  And if your site consists of more than one page, you have a navigation system which will help users to get to the rest of content on your site.  With these elements put in place, you have the recipe for an ethical SEO campaign.

Avoid doorway pages, or for that matter any other unethical SEO practice.  While they do attract more search engine spiders and more users it is important to view SEO as long term and thus SEO practices should be viewed in the same light.  Think of the repercussions.  By using doorway pages you are attracting business, after a while it grows considerably and you have put together quite a database of customers.  Just when you are starting to rely on their patronage, your site gets reviewed and your credibility takes a dive.  You may lose customers and from that point on, your site is no longer in the rankings which mean you may not attract anymore visitors.

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