Thread: What are doorway pages?

If you go to google and type "doorway pages" in the search bar you will find 688,000 answers to your question. Actually, everything you need to know about SEO can be found searching google. google is your friend

well i'm not familiar with the term doorway pages, but if i had to guess, i would say that it acts basically as a landing page, or order page. Then when a sale is made it takes you to a home page. A doorway page may even be as simple as a creative sent to peoples emails so when they open them up and click the link it sends them to a landing page or a home page. Basically it would be a page that gets someone interested in the product or ad, then when your click it it send to a website.

A doorway page simply is a page where you collect a user's information before sending them to your actual site. Obviously you can't just ask for it... you need to give them something in return (i.e. free report). Then, once they submit their information, they go to your actual site. It's called a 'doorway' page because it acts like a front door to your house: once they enter their information, the front door will open and they can go in the house, so to speak.

Just like Greg said... Google is your friend. In general the best way to get full length answers with examples for questions like this is with a basic google search or two... give it a try you'd be surprised what's out there.

Actually the-ref a doorway page is not where you collect some info from the user. A doorway page is a page designed especially to rank for a specific keyword or phrase. For more in-depth good info on this check out searchenginewatch dot com/showPage.html?page=2167831 (sorry about the formating but this forum does not let you use links to sites right away and I just joined here).
Also this site is a wealth of info on seo so you can learn more.

As I see it, doorway pages are pages for spamming the index of a search engine(spamdexing) by competing for some keywords, but their purpose is to redirect you to another page which doesn't have content about the keywords they advertise. It's one of SEO's "black hat tricks", which you shouldn't use, as the sites who use them are most of the times penalized ( their ranks are dropped)

Here's how you might create doorway pages:

Dump a list of long tails into MYSQL. Write a script that generates a page for every one of those long tails, and have content autogenerated for each page. Publish that jumble of pages on your domain, point a few links at it, and soon you'll have a few thousand doorway pages, each page targeting a single long tail term. Each page will have a javascript redirect so that when a searcher lands on a page they get redirected to your money page.

@ comusher: Wow, thanks for the clarification. I don't know what I was thinking... I was on autopilot thinking the question was about landing pages. My bad.

@ ExtraArm: Have you ever tried doing what you stated? That is a pretty blackhat strategy and I would think it would get your listings banned from Google within a month.

ExtraArm: Have you ever tried doing what you stated? That is a pretty blackhat strategy

The question of this thread is "What are doorway pages?" I'm just answering the question. Of course, if you take a walk over to the Google's Webmaster Guidelines, you'll see that doorway pages are a no-no. It is definitely not something to try with a domain you have long term plans for.