Doorway and Gateway Pages

Doorway pages are developed to rank highly for a specific keyword or phrase. They are of real use if a business sells multiple products or are in an extremely competitive market.

For example, a company with a large product portfolio may find it impossible or time consuming to optimise one page to cover every product across all the different search engines. Each engine is different. However, by creating doorway pages the company can create multiple entry points to their site focusing on keyword phrases for each specific product.

A doorway page contains all of the elements associated with any other web page. Typically they don't contain complex table layouts, extensive JavaScript, or a lot of images. What they do contain are titles, descriptions and body content have all been optimised for one or two specific keywords or keyword phrases. Doorway pages are created to specifically rank highly with a search and tend to be functional rather than pretty.

In fact, most doorway pages are never seen by the user. They do their job i.e. rank the website highly with the search engines and then will automatically divert to a more user-friendly page. In contrast to doorway pages, a gateway page, crawler page, or hallway page, is a page you do not want to rank highly with the engines. Typically, a gateway page does not contain meta tags and it contains very little textual content. Instead, it mainly contains a series of links to your doorway pages and the other pages on your web site.

The reason for creating a gateway page is that some search engines seem to give a boost to pages which the spider finds on its own rather than ones which are submitted directly to the search engines. Consequently, instead of submitting pages individually, the gateway page is submitted to the search engines. Spiders then crawl the gateway page and follow the links to each page on your site. The spider, being so happy that it found this content all on its own, may give your pages a boost. With or without the boost the fact remains - your pages have been crawled and indexed.

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