Doorway pages and search engine ranking

Published On - December 5, 2008

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What are doorway pages?

These are dynamically generated pages depending upon the user’s search, mostly used to fool the search engines by spam.


Wikipedia’s definition about doorway pages:

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.

How do search engines deal with them?

Doorway pages / orphan pages are generally used to cheat the search engines, showing that there are static pages on the site , while they are actually created on the fly and are not static pages.

Search engines currently don’t have much defense, they are still learning, but they do put such pages in secondary index as most of the data is common and also take action if reported as spam.

Does it help to increase ranking ?

This is a myth that doorway pages help in ranking of a site.
Reasons:
1. You will not get the link benefit as these pages are not at all connected to other pages.
2. These pages are hardly indexed
3. This is a spamming technique which will ruin your complete site if found by search engines.

Moral of the story is : Keep away from spamming and give quality content to the visitors from a long term perspective.