Destroying The Doorway Myth
Doorway pages have been an often used tool by webmasters and search engine optimizers to generate top rankings on the search engines. They are often machine generated via template in large batches, each slightly modified for the site being promoted. Very often they are not interconnected to the rest of the site and serve very little purpose other than to achieve top rankings and (hopefully) get the viewer to “click here to enter” your site.
Today, doorway pages are becoming less and less effective overall. Search engines are able to detect manufactured doorway pages if not properly implemented and the information provided does very little for the viewer. With no real connection to the rest of your site, most of these pages fail to achieve quality results, and the few that do can potentially be flagged as spam by the search engines.
Hiring an SEO company to create mass doorway pages might save you some money in the short term, however having each page on your site properly optimized by a professional is far more effective in the long term. Proper optimization is also more rewarding in the ultimate goal of driving visitors to your site, and getting the visitor response you need to stay in business.
Optimization Trumps
The most important pages on your site are pages that already exist. They exist because you felt the need to put them there. They either tell about your products or services, provide relevant information to the searcher, or direct them to that all-important order or subscription form. Your existing pages are your key pages… the pages most likely to interest the visitor, and the pages most likely to achieve top search engine rankings, if optimized properly.
It just makes sense to fully optimize your existing pages before even considering building extra “doorway” pages that are ultimately less effective than the real thing. Many SEO (search engine optimization) companies actually do very little site optimization in favor of creating individually optimized and targeted doorway pages designed solely at achieving top rankings.
In the past, doorway pages have been very effective, and if properly designed and integrated into your whole site, still can be. Unfortunately; very few who do create doorway pages do them properly, therefore, the rankings achieved as a result are usually only temporary at best.