Doorway Pages

In the light of recent changes in google’s ranking criteria, search engine optimization strategies should be reconsidered.
Google now pays more attention to on-site seo elements rather than off-site ranking criteria - like link popularity for example - which in the recent past was of great importance.
Of course, link popularity is still calculated in google’s rating system, but google tends to decrease it’s importance in a desperate effort to stop link buying and link selling practices from sites with high pagerank to “link buyers” who have enough budget to start a link buying campaign.
Sometimes those link investors ignore the importance of link relevancy in google’s clever ranking system, so google can easily identify them and drop their sites from the search results.
A proof that link popularity is not so important anymore is that this blog - a very new website without link popularity at all - ranks to the top of the search results, showing this way the importance of building a web site theme using the correct keyword density in your context, as well as that any web page must stay always targeted and focused on the main subject and always linked to pages with related content, preferably on the same domain name.
This way google can rest assured that the most relevant results are given to internet searchers.
The rise of importance of such on-page seo elements and the end of link popularity era makes doorway pages again very important.
Creating effective doorway pages is not something that can be learned in one day.
There are many factors to consider:
First, you have to find the right domain name, preferably an expired domain name, get the domain out from google’s sandbox and start creating your mini site, full with doorway pages and with an index page above any suspicion.
Then you have to decide if you are going to create all this by hand, or if you are going to use a doorway page software to do this job for you automatically.
Finally, you have to decide if your doorway pages must eventually redirect to your main site, or alternatively, if you are going to pass your commercial message on your doorway pages, without using any kind of redirection, and this way minimize chances your domain name to get banned.
If the domain name - the one that has the doorway pages - is important for you, then do not use redirection, but try instead to pass your marketing message on your doorway pages and also try to make your doorway pages looking great and more human-friendly, because people are going to see them.
If the domain name is expendable for you and you don’t care if it gets banned or not - because after it gets banned you just buy another - then use the redirection and sent the traffic directly to your main site.
Also, you should consider the choice of the right hosting services:
Seo hosting services which offer managed dns, can help you hide your IP address and display different nameserver sets for all your doorway domain names a.k.a. mini sites than those nameserver sets associated with your main site.
This way, search engines will never know if the owner of the domain name - which has the doorway pages on it - is the same person with the owner of the main site you want to promote.
Now we are going to answer to the following questions:
1) What effective doorway pages are and how do they look like?
2) Which are the criteria that google will use to weight them and finally rank them and how those doorway pages can meet the requirements?
In the following tutorials 2, 3, and 4 we are also going to talk about redirection, on page elements, advanced domain name strategies, as well as how to pass your marketing message.
So, what effective doorway pages really are and how do they look like?
Obviously effective doorway pages are those doorway pages that accomplish their mission: Rank to the top of the search results, preferably those of google, bringing hordes of targeted visitors and prospective buyers to your web site.
In this part 1, I am not going to write about on-page seo elements that doorway pages must have in order to rank high. I will talk about this in the next few parts.
Now I will only tell you that you should avoid sitemap.xml file submission at all costs if you have doorway pages in your web site.
Let google find and index your doorway pages slowly, passing from one to another in a smooth and natural way rather than submitting a sitemap.xml which will reveal your hidden doorway pages strategy.
How do doorway pages look like? Generally speaking, I found a description of “how doorway pages look like” in wikipedia:
“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.” the author from wikipedia says. But is this true? Why should the purpose of the doorway pages be to send the visitors “to another page”? Couldn’t the same doorway pages include your advertising message inside themselves?
To tell you the truth, I have created 1000’s of doorway pages using my software and none of these pages redirects nowhere.
My marketing message is always included on-page and I don’t know how search engines can define if my doorway pages really are doorway pages.
Besides, doorway pages are just pages like any other web pages!
The wikipedia author continues: “If a visitor clicks through to a typical doorway page from a search engine results page, in most cases they will be redirected with a fast meta refresh command to another page. Other forms of redirection include use of Javascript and server side redirection, either through the .htaccess file or from the server configuration file.”
This now is misinformation and negative propaganda against doorway pages.
The author assumes that “all doorway pages will redirect in one way or another” and also says nothing about the modern redirection techniques nowdays doorway pages use, like for example flash redirection, mouse over redirection or even ajax redirection!
He adds: “Some doorway pages may be dynamic pages generated by scripting languages such as Perl and PHP”. Finally this is true, for example doorway pages made with my software are PHP pages, and then he goes on: “Doorway pages are often easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings”.
I totally disagree.
This is the most common misconception; that doorway pages cannot meet both the ranking criteria and in the mean time be well presentable to humans.
Can’t for example doorway pages use css to look nice?
He continues: “Sometimes a doorway page is copied from another high ranking page, but this is likely to cause the search engine to detect the page as a duplicate and exclude it from the search engine listings.”
So, can’t the doorway pages have unique and relative content? My doorway pages all have!
I understand that the author assumes that it would be difficult to write unique and relevant content for the doorway pages automatically and also make them look nice, but what he does not know is that there is a software application that does exactly that.
Finally, he adds some good words about doorway pages: “More sophisticated doorway pages, called Content Rich Doorways, are designed to gain high placement in search results without using redirection”.
In the end, the wikipedia author accepts the existence of superior and content rich doorway pages, where the contextual elements have been emphasized.
He also admits that some doorway pages “are designed to gain high placement in search results without using redirection”.
Conclusions: Negative propaganda and misinformation about doorway pages is widely spread all over the internet.
Self-proclaimed “SEO experts” will tell you one way or another to avoid doorway pages. They will tell you that if you make them you will get banned.
What they don’t tell you is that you can simply have them on another expendable domain name, and if finally you get banned you just get another domain!
They are only going to propose you to pay them high fees to optimize your web site, or even worse, they will just propose you to pay for over-priced PPC campaigns which finally will lead you to bankruptcy and your online business to complete failure.
More about doorway pages on part two, coming shortly.