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Doorway Page
Definition
A page made specifically to rank well in search engines for particular keywords, serving as an entry point through which visitors pass to the main content.
Information
In practice, usage of doorway pages varies considerably, and there
are countless other terms used to describe them. The pages themselves range from unique,
content-rich pages to generic, keyword-stuffed pages.
Doorway pages have acquired something of a bad reputation due to the
frequent use (and abuse) of doorways in spamming the search engines. The most
flagrant abuses include mass production of machine-generated pages
with only minor variations, sometimes using re-direction or cloaking
so the visitor does not see the actual page requested. Doorways used
in this manner add to the clutter that search engines and Web searchers
must contend with.
Critics of doorway pages contend that the time & effort spent generating
pages would be better spent optimizing
pages that are integrated into the content of the Web site, plus producing more content to attract repeat visitors.
A wide range of opinions exists concerning
what constitutes a doorway page and when they are acceptable. One of the most
common justifications is for sites which have database-driven
content that would otherwise be invisible to the search engines.
Some would argue that every single page on a Web site is a doorway.
Perhaps, but then the term "doorway page" would lack any distinct
meaning, with no term to describe the pages that are created specifically for the
search engines.
Synonyms
entry page
bridge page
Related Terms
doorway domain,
search engine optimization
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