Doorway pages: An SEO deep dive - Search Engine Land

I have an admission: I once created “doorway pages” on a large scale.

In my defense, this was years before Google existed. And, it was not considered spam in those days.

Doorway pages might seem like a nebulous concept for some marketers to grasp. Since Google announced that creating such pages was considered illicit practice, there has been some confusion.

However, such mixups are just as wrong as cloaking in SEO. So read on, and I will explain what doorway pages are, how to watch for them, and what to do about them.

What are doorway pages?

Google defines doorways as:

“…sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries. They lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination.”

They also cite the following examples as doorways:

• Having multiple websites with slight variations to the URL and home page to maximize their reach for any specific query
• Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page
• Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s)
• Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy

The early days of doorway pages

Doorway pages seemed like a mystical, magical thing back in the earliest days of search engines.

This is partly because, in the advent of the commercialized/public internet, everyone thought that website visitors would only enter your site via...

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