Search Engine Marketing: January 2009 Archives

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Doorway Pages: "Black Hat" All the Way

Have you ever seriously considered using doorway pages to attract visitors to your website and control where on your site they end up? If so, you'll want to hear what the experts think about this very popular SEO tactic that's frequently used by overzealous webmasters and perhaps even more frequently pushed on the reticent entrepreneur by profit-seeking SEO companies.

But, first, let's define our terms so there's no confusion about the type of page we're referring to. According to Wikipedia, doorway pages (also called gateway pages, portal pages, entry pages, and jump pages, among other names) are

low-quality web pages that contain very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar keywords and phrases. They are designed to rank highly [sic] within the search results, but serve no purpose to visitors looking for information. A doorway page will generally have "click here to enter" on the page.

Here's what Marc D. Ensign, CEO of Sound-n-Vision (a NJ web design and Internet marketing company) has to say about doorway pages and SEO in his article, Debunking the Top 10 Search Engine Myths, posted at SiteProNews:

Many companies will sell this idea of increasing your ranking by creating hundreds of one page sites loaded with keywords that link to you from various domains. This is considered spamming the search engine and is not recommended. If you properly optimize your site and focus on the correct way to get listed, you will increase your ranking much quicker than these doorway pages ever could. 

The use of doorway pages is considered by many experts to be a "black hat" SEO tactic that should be avoided at all costs. Beanstalk offers a list of Black-Hat SEO Tactics  that it states quite simply are "not legitimate." It also warns that, "while some (black-hat SEO tactics) may work in the short term, they WILL get your website penalized and/or banned eventually." As you may have guessed, one of these serious breaches of SEO "Netiquette" is doorway pages.

Beanstalk offers this further counsel about doorway pages that are generated by software and added to a site automatically - such a deceptively simple and seemingly innocuous activity:

This is a very dangerous practice. Not only are many of the methods of injecting doorway pages banned by the search engines but a quick report to the search engine of this practice and your website will simply disappear along with all the legitimate ranks you have attained with your genuine content pages. 

According to an SEO Bank post, called (you guessed it), Black Hat SEO,

Black Hat techniques are just plain bad business practice. They also do the search engines and the search users a huge disservice by contributing to poor quality of results. This adds nothing to the end user experience. 

SEO Bank also states that black hat techniques are "not ethical" and adds that they are "probably illegal." It also offers the following warning, which website owners would do well to heed: "Black Hat techniques will always increase the risk that a site will be deliberately removed from a search engine's index."

Landing Pages: The "White Hat" Alternative 

Doorway pages shouldn't be confused with landing pages, which are content-rich web pages used by businesses and other organizations to capture sales leads, make contact for later interaction, or encourage immediate online transactions. Whereas doorway pages are designed to mislead both the website visitor and the search engine, the use of landing pages is a legitimate SEO/SEM technique.

According to Wikipedia, landing pages (also known as lead capture pages) come in two varieties.  Reference landing pages provide such helpful content as text, images, and links that are relevant to a visitor's interest area (which can be determined by the search terms, or keywords, he or she has used to arrive at a particular landing page). They provide something of value to the visitor, and that something is relevant information. Transactional landing pages attempt to convince the visitor to complete a transaction of one kind or other - whether it be filling out a form or purchasing a product. Transactional landing pages can be every bit as relevant to a visitor's search string as reference landing pages can, which is why they, too, (unlike doorway pages) represent a legitimate SEO/SEM strategy.

Check out Landing Page Tutorials and Case Studies, on Copyblogger, where Brian Clark will help you get started using or improving your current landing pages to make them more effective. (This post is chock full of links to helpful tutorials providing just the guidance you need to optimize or create your own landing pages.) 

So, what's the difference between doorway pages and landing pages? They're as different as black and white: black hat and white hat. Doorway pages equal black hat SEO (the kind you don't want to touch with a 10-foot pole), and landing pages equal white hat SEO (the kind that can enhance your business and increase your profits without jeopardizing your long-term search engine ranking - two methods of attracting website traffic that are as different as night and day.

Which one will you choose for your business?