Doorway Pages

SEOs sometimes create dummy pages usually, with the aim of doing well for a particular keyword. These pages are aimed at search engines to improve the rankings of websites. They are generally not accessible by visitors as they are immediately redirected from doorway pages. Doorway pages are not really aptly named. They provide no door ways for visitors to a website. They actually redirect new visitors to the 'real' website, usually without their knowledge.

Doorway pages are black hat SEO technique where HTML web pages are specifically created with keywords and information that can be read by search engine robots only. When human visitors land on these pages they are redirected. They are also known as bridge pages, portal pages, zebra pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and so on. Doorway pages that show one version of the website to visitors and another to search engines use a form of cloaking. They differentiate between a search engine robot and human visitor on the basis of either their IP address or user agent or both.

Doorway pages are created for spamdexing i.e. inserting results for particular keywords in order to spam the index of a search engine. Basically created with the purpose of ranking high on search engines, they are centered around keywords relevant to the general context of a particular website.

content rich doorways, on the other hand, are created to improve search engine ranking but do not use redirect. They use some semblance of design and navigation and offer standard links to visitors.

A typical doorway page would use a fast META refresh to redirect you to another page. Or using Javascript and server side redirection, either through the .htaccess file or from the server configuration file users can be redirected to other pages. Some doorway pages may be dynamic pages generated by scripting languages such as Perl and PHP. Search engines have caught on to this trend and now expend penalties for using the META refresh command, so now spammers can trick you into clicking on a link to get you to the desired destination page, or they use Javascript for redirection.