Doorway Pages Vs Doorway Sites

[WingMike27]

Hello all!

I'm a new web developer and I've been trying to learn as much about search engines as possible. I was reading about "Doorway sites" and "Doorway pages", but I don't understand the difference.

Some websites say that "doorway sites" are ok and that "doorway pages" are bad. AND vise versa.

So what is the deal? Are they bad or good or what? Is there a difference?


:eek:

[AussieWebmaster]

door way anything is a way to spam the engines by creating content that gets listed in the engines as one set of content and the user gets redirected to another site with different content

[WingMike27]

And what if the content is the same from site to site?

I found something that said "Doorway pages" are pages that appear in a domain, but are optimized differently AND don't show up in the main navigation. So basically, these pages aren't for people - they're for search engines to pick up. So, this is bad.

But today I found a website on a domain with a homepage that linked to pages on another domain. When I visited the homepage, it was identical. And you're saying this isn't ok?

Does this make sense?

Example:

1. www.domain1.com = homepage has images and text links to domain2.com

2. www.domain2.com = has the exact homepage as domain1.com and I never knew i left domain1.com - same content.

[AussieWebmaster]

website 1 is a doorway site for site two... try using a crawler to see if they are diufferent

[WingMike27]

Ya.. everything is the same - images, flash and all. The only thing different are the names of the images.

So this is bad? I think this site has been up for a few years.

[WingMike27]

AHHHHHhhhh, i found this:

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.

This is what I ran into with that site. hmmm... shaddy....

[WingMike27]

WAIT!

So what's the difference between a landing page linked from an ad and a doorway page. It seems like the same thing.