Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamdexing, this is, for spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending visitors to a different page. They are also known as bridge pages, portal pages, zebra pages (a humorous arbitrary coinage by Jill Whalen of High Rankings Advisor), jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and by other names. Doorway pages that redirect visitors without their knowledge use some form of cloaking.

[edit] Explanation

If a visitor clicks through to a typical doorway page from a search engine results page, in most cases they will be redirected with a fast Meta refresh command to another page. Other forms of redirection include use of Javascript and server side redirection, either through the .htaccess file or from the server configuration file. Some doorway pages may be dynamic pages generated by scripting languages such as Perl and PHP.

Doorway pages are often easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings. Sometimes a doorway page is copied from another high ranking page, but this is likely to cause the search engine to detect the page as a duplicate and exclude it from the search engine listings.

Because many search engines give a penalty for using the META refresh command^{[citation needed]}, some doorway pages just trick the visitor into clicking on a link to get them to the desired destination page, or they use Javascript for redirection.

More sophisticated doorway pages, called Content Rich Doorways, are designed to gain high placement in search results without using redirection. They incorporate at least a minimum amount of design and navigation similar to the rest of the site to provide a more human-friendly and natural appearance. Visitors are offered standard links as calls to action.

Landing pages are regularly misconstrued to equate to Doorway pages within the literature and should be avoided. The former are content rich pages to which traffic is directed to within the context of pay-per-click campaigns and to maximize SEO campaigns.

[edit] Cloaking

Another form of doorway pages are using a method called Cloaking. They show a version of that page to the visitor, but different from the one provided to crawlers, using server side scripts. They know whether it's a bot or a visitor based on their IP address and/or user-agent.

[edit] Construction

A content rich doorway page must be constructed in a Search engine friendly (SEF) manner, otherwise it may be construed as search engine spam possibly resulting in the page being banned from the index for an undisclosed amount of time.

These types of doorways utilize (but are not limited to) the following:

• Content Vs. Keyword density strategies in order to rank higher in the index
• SEF navigation for easy spidering
• Alt - Title Attributed images for key word support
• Title Attributed links for key word support

Keep in mind that doorway pages are normally used for targeted product recognition and or primary site viability support.

[edit] See also

• Cloaking
• Keyword stuffing
• Page hijacking
• Spamdexing

[edit] References

• What are doorway pages?
• Doorway Pages: Web Site Ranking Aids, or Unethical Shortcuts