Loading ...Doorway pages are definitely in the grey area of website design. There are many companies out there who employ a doorway page at the beginning of their site. This is usually an aesthetically pleasing page that serves no purpose other than to elevate the status of the site and the expectations of the viewer. From an SEO point of view, they can be extremely dangerous.
There are many places in Google’s guidelines which state outright that the search engine giant does not like doorway pages. Google lists doorway pages as one of the main reasons your site may be removed from the index, and long ago stated outright that ‘Google does not encourage the use of doorway pages.’ This kind of blunt statement is the stuff to make any SEO expert wary.
So, why are search engines down on what is essentially another page on a website? When it comes to design, a doorway page is any page a viewer cannot access through the site’s navigation. Doorway pages aren’t designed to be reached; they are designed to be looked at. This is why doorway pages can be used for less-than legitimate reasons, and are sometimes frowned on by those in the know.
There are a couple of ways doorway pages have been used in the past for less than legitimate reasons. The major one, when it comes to search engine optimisation, is in stuffing the doorway page full of keywords in order to draw search engine attention. This is just the same as stuffing any other page full of keywords, and just as frowned upon by the search engines. In fact, even optimising a doorway page has its difficulties, because it can be difficult to convince the search engines that a doorway page is of any value to your site’s users.
Doorway pages are also commonly used as a form of cloaking. For this particular black hat trick, the doorway page is optimised for a particular term, and then takes the user through to an unrelated site. Often, these kinds of doorways don’t appear to the user at all, as an automatic redirect is implemented which whisks them through to the cloaked site. This has led to a general wariness in users about doorway pages. After all, no-one wants to risk a nasty surprise.
When it comes to your users, doorway pages are a bad idea. If someone finds your page in their SERPs, and has bothered to click on it, how likely are they to want to click again? If you have examined your site’s internal structure you will know that the fewer clicks involved the better. Each click gives your site’s users a chance to give up and go away.
Some sites get into trouble because of the software they use to build their pages. Some SEO software will include doorway pages in its structures. Other companies genuinely want a doorway page but over-optimise it. It is a difficult area to navigate safely, and the help of an expert can be invaluable. Talk to us at SEO Consult about doorway pages and how to get around problems.
Related posts:
- Dangers of reciprocal links for your ranking
- The dangers of PDFs
- Don’t forget your landing pages
- SEO for different web pages
- Google Place Pages
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