Once upon a time the creation of doorway pages was a bona fide technique allowed by use of webmasters. It was allowed as a means to influence ranking in search engines rankings. It encompassed a webmaster being able to calculate algorithms and then building WebPages that ranked higher based on these calculations.

They had, and still have available to them software that can automatically generate these pages. By simply entering specific information into form fields it can generate pages that are optimized for a selected search engine’s keyword sets.

But unfortunately the technique of creating doorway pages was abused. For example websites that contained only a few core pages of content but hundreds of gateway pages starting showing up.

The result is that doorway pages are very frowned on by major search engines today. Machine generated pages are not being considered in search engine indexes anymore. Some search engines bury them so far down they will never see the light of day while others impose penalties or ban them from their indexes. The reason they are frowned on is that they dilute the quality of results provided by search engines.

How can a search engine detect doorway pages?

If a Webpage is automatically or machine generated it leaves a specific footprint or structure. As many doorways pages are orphaned they don’t have any links pointing to them, yet they have many pointing away from them which are aimed at a specific page that they are targeting for a keyword.

This is a sure giveaway to a search engine spider.

There are alternatives to doorway pages

• Restructuring existing visible content
o This entails a complete rewrite of existing content. This especially applies if content has been taken from traditional media.
• Refining existing visible content
o If WebPages are packed full of information regarding every product or services offered it may become dulled or uninteresting. They also make it difficult to target specific keywords.
o If this is the case content needs to be broken up into separate WebPages
• Developing additional content rich pages
o In order for a website to be considered well designed each page should be content rich
o Instead of one long page discussing services or products, a group of content rich WebPages will add to the overall relevancy and structure
o You may end up with many more WebPages but each one will be targeted instead of generalized
o You will now have WebPages that are refined and specific for each service or product.
o These WebPages will also need to be strategically linked so that they offer logical navigation for both human reader and search engine spider
• Restructuring Coding
o This may entail a complete architecture rebuild. Coding needs to be stripped of html tags if it is to achieve optimization.
o Presentation attributes need to be built into an external .css file
o JavaScript functions also needs to be placed in an external file so that code can be minimized behind pages
o Image files an directory names may need to be changed along with file naming conventions

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