Doorway page

Doorway pages (bridge pages, portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages or entry pages) are web pages that are created for the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes (

SEO

.

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, from the server configuration file. Some doorway pages may be dynamic pages generated by scripting languages such as Perl and PHP.

Identification

Doorway pages are often easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings. 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.

Because many search engines give a penalty for using the META refresh command,^[1] some doorway pages just trick the visitor into clicking on a link to get them to the desired destination page, or they use JavaScript for redirection.

More sophisticated doorway pages, called Content Rich Doorways, are designed to gain high placement in search results without using redirection. They incorporate at least a minimum amount of design and navigation similar to the rest of the site to provide a more human-friendly and natural appearance. Visitors are offered standard links as calls to action.

SEO

campaigns.

Doorway pages are also typically used for sites that maintain a blacklist of URLs known to harbor spam, such as

Deviantart

.

Cloaking

Doorway pages often also employ

user-agent. Cloaking will simultaneously trick search engines to rank sites higher for irrelevant keywords, while displaying monetizing any human traffic by showing visitors spammy, often irrelevant, content. The practice of cloaking is considered to be highly manipulative and condemned within the SEO industry and by search engines, and its use can result in significant penalty or the complete removal of sites from being indexed. ^[2]

Redirection

Webmasters that use doorway pages would generally prefer that users never actually see these pages and instead be delivered to a "real" page within their sites. To achieve this goal, redirection is sometimes used. This may be as simple as installing a meta refresh tag on the doorway pages. An advanced system might make use of cloaking. In either case, such redirection may make your doorway pages unacceptable to search engines.

Construction

A content-rich doorway page must be constructed in a search-engine-friendly manner, or it may be construed as search engine spam, possibly resulting in the page being banned from the index for an undisclosed amount of time.

These types of doorways utilize (but are not limited to) the following:

Title-attributed images for keyword support
Title-attributed links for keyword support

In culture

Doorway pages were examined as a cultural and political phenomenon along with

flarf.^[3]

References

^ "Google Groups". www.google.com. Retrieved 2018-04-24.
^ "Webmaster Guidelines - Search Console Help". support.google.com. Retrieved 2018-04-24.
^ Kurtov, Michael. "Doorway into Weak Beauty. On the Cultural and Political Value of Spamdexing". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)

External links

[1] "Google Groups". www.google.com. Retrieved 2018-04-24.

[2] "Webmaster Guidelines - Search Console Help". support.google.com. Retrieved 2018-04-24.

[3] Kurtov, Michael. "Doorway into Weak Beauty. On the Cultural and Political Value of Spamdexing". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)

[1]

[2]

[3]