Doorway Pages
To spam or not to spam … that is the question. Since the dawn of the SEO community spam and spam tactics, including doorway pages, have been
used and often abused by those hoping to attain higher ranking on the search engines. The problem with these tactics is that they are often
short-lived as the search engines work hard to keep up and eventually penalize sites using these tactics. So what can a Webmaster do to attain
top positioning?
In this article we will focus on the use of doorway pages in this, part one of three articles covering commonly used spam tactics and the more
“legitimate” (we’ll call anything that the search engines haven’t spoken out against “legitimate”) methods for attaining these top positions.
Doorway Pages And Why They Are Penalized
By definition doorway pages are pages of with keyword heavy content, not meant to be seen by the visitor but which are designed to attain high
rankings on search engines. There is generally a forward or redirect on this page which will take the searcher to a “pitch page” or index
page.
Because these pages serve no useful function other than attaining high rankings, the search engines have attempted time and time again to
penalize sites using them.
As “intelligent” as many search engine algorithms are, webmasters and “black arts” SEO’s are constantly in a battle with them to workaround
the detection of redirect technology. In the end however, virtually every technology will be found out. When you’re site hits the top 10 and your
competitors notice the redirect they are likely to report you and then Google will take a look at how you’ve done it and add detection for that
tactic. Basically, using redirect technology may work for a while however it will get found out eventually so it should only be used if you are
using a dummy domain that you want to discard, or if you just don’t care if your site gets blacklisted.
What can you do to provide the same effect for your website without the risk?
Until recently there was only one commonly used tactic that would provide the same effect for your website without the use of a redirect and
that was hidden text. The problem with hidden text now is that … once again … the search engines have built into their algorithms the ability to
detect it. This is relatively simple; if the background is the same color as the text then it is considered hidden (a fairly obvious detection
strategy right?).
And again, webmasters have come up with a workaround for this one. And it is …
Going to have to wait until the next article where I will be covering hidden text tactics.
There has now emerged a second method of providing the benefits of doorway pages without the delectability and that is through the use of
server-side technology. Recently a company called SEO Doctor has developed a server-based application that, through the use of tags injected into
your html, will supply content that you input through a browser interface, and feed that content only to search engines. When a genuine visitor
is on your site it is detected, the server strips the tags out of the code, and the additional content is omitted. When a spider comes the
content is injected.
The greatest single advantage of this is that it enables webmasters to write their content how it best reads and then inject content for the
search engines that will attain high rankings while maintaining readability for the visitor by leaving out that content when a live person is
there. Another plus to this technology is that it is set to detect specifically which engine is visiting your site and it allows the webmaster to
write content specifically for each of the major engines. They don’t follow the same guidelines and now you don’t have to either.
Conclusion
The use of doorway pages is now an obsolete idea. Some SEO’s will continue to present doorway pages as a benefit to you but you will either
end up with a site with high ranking pages and horrible content, or with redirects that will eventually be detected and get your site
blacklisted.
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