A doorway page is basically a page built to feed a bunch of text and keywords to a search engine algorithm. On top of the page you’ll find a link to another website, usually the website belonging to the person that made the doorway page, if not produced by a hired black hat SEO consultant. Using doorway pages is grounds for being banned by search engines. You may ask, does it still work? I’ve found it does for some people, for maybe a week depending on keyword competition. When competitors find out your ranking above them, many will look to find out why. If they find you’re using a spam method, eventually one will report your site to Google. Then your site probably has about a week of life left before it drops off the charts. One SEO guy contacted me concerning another site of mine saying he could guarantee my website top placement for 10 localized keywords of my choice for the cost of $1600. You know, for $1600 I could pay some top industry editor to write me up super resource articles on the subject, post them on my blog and reap the white hat benefits. Quality will in most cases outlive any blackhat technique.
Have you ever thought how when someone reports a website to google, google benefits without paying back the person who reported. Its like they have a huge number of spam staff employed that they will never have to pay back, with money anyways. I guess that’s when you know you’ve reached success, when thousands work for your company free of charge.
I found this explanation of a doorway page while searching for my own type of “Front Door” page. A Front Door Page is NOT a black hat method of stealing traffic.
Front Door Pages are a focal point for a business niche, in a specific locale. For example, I have a Front Door Page for a local music store that I am promoting in the search engines. The poor guy’s website itself was in Google’s “Witness Protection Program” — no matter which keywords you searched for that could have brought him some traffic, he remained invisible!
Do a Google search for “used guitars Scranton” and you’ll see both a blog post and the Front Door Page for this business at the top of the search results.
Notice that there are no “sneaky” redirects or other questionable practices to put these pages in peril of getting de-indexed by Google.
Instead, these pages have all the SEO and backlinking support that I learned doing Direct Response Internet Marketing for my own products and services.
While these Front Door Pages are specifically made for local businesses, the underlying SEO and backlinking methods they employ also work regionally and internationally. That’s because they are based on sound, ethical SEO.
There’s no question they work; the competition of the search key terms used will determine how long it is before someone goes complaining to google about the site’s seo methods. (more competition more risk to narcs)
In your comment, your mention that doorway pages are not considered blackhat. I would have to disagree.
Googles Words on Doorway Pages:
“Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of our webmaster guidelines.
Google’s aim is to give our users the most valuable and relevant search results. Therefore, we frown on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the ones they selected, and that provide content solely for the benefit of search engines. Google may take action on doorway sites and other sites making use of these deceptive practice, including removing these sites from the Google index. ”
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355
“In your comment, your mention that doorway pages are not considered blackhat.”
No, I said my Front Door Pages are not blackhat. Doorway pages definitely are black hat.
My pages do not redirect people to sites other than the one they desired. They deliver the page that appeared in the title, description and URL in the search results (q.v.):
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Scranton+plumbers&btnG=Search
There are two blog posts and a Front Door Page for “Scranton plumbers” at the top of the search results. Note that there are no redirects or other deceptive practices used here.
Do not confuse or conflate the two, even if they appear to have similar names. Doorway pages are anathema. Front Door Pages are local business promotion at its best.