Doorway pages are those pages designed to draw users through a page into your site. Just as doorways can be prettified in the real world, doorway pages are done up to attract the attention of search engines and visitors, but are not places people can linger.

These kinds of pages are on the edges of decent SEO. Some companies use them routinely. They are often placed at the entrance to a site as a way of welcoming the visitor, a sort of ‘hello, this is what the site’s about’ greeting before the real business of the site begins. This is one of the reasons that large corporations use doorway pages, as they provide the same kind of imposing facade a real-world lobby can give.

Unfortunately, doorway pages provide about as much interest and value to a user as a real-life lobby as well. People don’t enjoy sitting in lobbies. They’re impatient to get on with what they came to do, and see the real workings of the company. Lobbies can also make people feel small and unimportant.

So it is with doorway pages. This is fine if you want to impress the average user with your importance. If you already have a reputation, and are regarded as an authority, a doorway page can add to the design of your website. It can also complicate your interaction with the search engines.

Doorway pages can be used for spam and as part of black hat SEO. For example, say a doorway page has been optimised for the phrase ‘couples counselling.’ The user clicks on the link in the SERPs, and comes to a page that features a nicely set out ad for couples counselling, with a link requesting ‘click here for couples counselling.’ This could then take the user to a link farm or any number of unsavoury alternatives.

Black hatters also use doorway pages to boost a site’s ranking for a keyword, coding the page so that a user never even sees it before getting drawn in to the main site. It is for this reason that doorway pages make search engines suspicious, as the page has been written only for the benefit of search engine spiders.

So, why do companies still use doorway pages? As noted above, some big sites gain a benefit from a doorway page. Some other sites are tricked into using them as part of their search engine optimisation strategy. Unfortunately, there are SEO companies out there that actively damage their clients’ reputations with doorway pages, simply because they produce quick results. Google mentions several times in its guidelines the damage that this use of doorway pages can wreak on your PageRank. If you are concerned about pages on your site, you should talk to our experts at SEO Consult.

When it comes down to it, doorway pages don’t help your site’s traffic. Internet users are increasingly suspicious of anything that doesn’t seem to be up front. A doorway page, these days, is another opportunity for them to turn away from your site.

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