Definition: A doorway page is content created specifically for the purpose of garnering high placements in the search engines.

Issue: Google makes the following specific recommendation (among others): Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

This article addresses the issue of doorway pages, proposes an acceptable alternative and offers some insights into the basic principles of search engine optimization.

To frame the issue of doorway pages, it is important to understand why content is so critical to search engine optimization.

First, we need to step back and take a look at the search engines themselves:

• Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all other search engines want to provide the same thing: a prioritized list of links that point to most relevant Web sites satisfying the user's search criteria.
  
  
• Relevance is defined as the "best content" with the "best fit" to the user's search. That's a search engine's value—providing efficient access to the information a user wants when they want it.
  
  
• The search engine that does the best job of delivering the largest quantity of the most relevant results attracts the most users.
  
  
• Obviously, speed, ease-of-use and "marketing" have an impact on popularity, but in the end the quality of the results counts most.

The best way for you to get long-term results is by "partnering" with the search engines. Partnering means recognizing and supporting the value proposition that the search engines provide to their end users:

• Provide lots of highly relevant content
  
  
• Follow accepted (i.e. ethical) search engine optimization principles

Is there an alternative? Sure, like many situations there are always shortcuts and quick fixes that purport to let you "game the system." Instead of partnering with the search providers, you can compete with them. By "compete," I mean all the effort (and dollars) expended to chase their constantly evolving algorithms and artificially increase your site's rankings.

These techniques may get you short-term results, but many are considered the equivalent of "spamming" and could get your site de-listed. From a search engine provider's point of view, anything that gets better results for sites with inferior content (and fit) is compromising its product—and the better result is temporary, because the provider will tune its algorithm to correctly rank your site (down).

One of these shortcuts is the use of "doorway pages." The rest of this article discusses the use of doorway pages and recommends an alternative approach.

What Is a Doorway Page?

Doorway pages are pages of content that have been specifically designed to achieve high rankings in the search engines. They are often used by Web sites that don't have an abundance of content within the main pages of their site due to technology issues or design conflicts.

They can be an effective tool for garnering short-term placement in search engine rankings when used appropriately. But doorway pages have been abused by Web sites for many years, to the point that they are frowned upon by search engines, which now attempt to exclude them from their result pages.

What does a "doorway page" look like? A doorway page appears as if it were built specifically to attain high search engine placement, and offers little value to searchers. It often has the following characteristics:

• A lot of poorly written content, with an abundance of hyperlinked phrases in the body text
  
  
• Copy that is stuffed with lists of keywords
  
  
• Zero (0) inbound links from other parts of the Web site (Example: you build a doorway page named "targeted-keyword.html," but do not link to this page from any other part of your site. Google assumes no inbound links exist because this page is of little value and you want to hide it from regular visitors to its site)
  
  
• A "redirection" that automatically loads a new page once the doorway pages is accessed