Ethic Doorway Page

[Dj Morri]

Hello Everybody:

I work for a very big company and they want to get good rankings on 1 or maybe 2 keywords but to make changes in the actually section is a tremendous work, time consuming, lawyers, etc.

I came up with the idea to make a "doorway page" , I am going to create a page with the best intentions and actually the page will be 100% related with our product.

Questions:
Does the doorway page has to be linked in any way with our website? or I just create the page and put a link to my product page? In case the answer is YES, how can I name that doorway page ?

If I want to be ranked in 2 words is ethical to create 2 doorway pages, one for key#1 and other for key#1, but both goes to the same product page ?

AS ALWAYS THANK YOU FOR YOUR HELP

[Nacho]

I work for a very big company . . .

Questions:
Does the doorway page has to be linked in any way with our website? or I just create the page and put a link to my product page? In case the answer is YES, how can I name that doorway page ?

If I want to be ranked in 2 words is ethical to create 2 doorway pages, one for key#1 and other for key#1, but both goes to the same product page ?

AS ALWAYS THANK YOU FOR YOUR HELP
Quick answer to both of them. If your "big company" spent . . . say $100 million developing its site + business model . . . then, are you willing to tell your boss some day, "Oooops, we just got banned by SE X because we tried to implement a 'doorway page' strategy". My guess is that he/she will not be very pleased to hear this news.

My recommendation to you is, keep it simple and to best practices as much as possible. Only let the experts handle a technique that envolves a higher level of risk, by outsoucing this type of SEO to them.

Mis 2 centavitos. ;)

[Dj Morri]

The Fine Line Between Doorway Pages and Spam
As taken from: http://spider-food.net/doorway-pages-b.html

Let's say that you have a 6 page web site. Would it make sense for you to have 100 doorway pages pointing to it? Definitely not.

But in our prior example of a company selling 100 products, would it make sense for the company to have a doorway page for each product? Well, it might. Each of these pages could be specifically relevant to the product that was being sold. If you have similar products then you can combine them.

With that in mind, you are going to have to use some human judgment to determine which doorway pages you should build. That is because you don't want to be labeled as a 'spammer' by the engines.

I say this because in some instances, there is a very gray line between when a doorway page enhances the search results and when a doorway page becomes spam. Each search engine has the authority to define when you are spamming them, so you should put some careful thought into exactly what you are going to create.

Doorway pages which use the Meta Refresh tag to catapult a viewer from one page to another are considered spam. This technique was abused extensively by the XXX industry, and as a consequence, many engines now consider any type of Meta Refresh spam. If you must redirect, use JavaScript or some server side function and delay the redirect for as long as possible. A length of 10 seconds should put you in the safe zone. Be sure that the redirect is relevant if you must use it.

Doorway pages that appear to be identical to each other are also considered spam. This most often occurs when a webmaster optimizes slightly different versions of the same page to rank highly for slightly different keyword phrases. If you've ever done a search on the web and seen the same site listed over and over again in the search engine results, you'll quickly understand why this type of behavior is frowned upon.

The answer it to use a fair and balanced approach.

Ideally, a doorway page should lead to the page which deals with the specific product, service or subject matter of the doorway.

Any comments ?

[Nacho]

IMO, I think what J.K. Bowman is trying to say, is that if you design a site using a "Search Engine Theme Pyramids (http://www.searchengineworld.com/engine/theme_pyramids.htm)" structure as Brett Tabke wrote a while back, then you should be OK by making these spin off pages your money pages.

<side note>
Brett's explanaition is one of the best doucments I've ever come across that not only I recommend in my "Search Engine Marketing 101 (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=2086)" thread, but it's one of the very first places anyone should start when building or rebuilding any site.
</side note>

Anyway, if that's the case, then I would not call them "doorway pages", but rather "landing pages". Unless you are planning to do some boogie magic with them.

[NFFC]

>but to make changes in the actually section is a tremendous work, time consuming, lawyers, etc.

Then you need to explain to them there is a new kid in town, goes by the name of Dj Morri and they need to work with him not against him.

>then I would not call them "doorway pages", but rather "landing pages"

You can call them whatever you like, and I have heard them called many names, a doorway page is a doorway page.

[seobook]

if they are a large corporate site I seriously doubt you making two doorway pages will probably hurt them. just get lots of keyword rich links pointing into the doorway pages from lots of sites.

[seomike]

I wouldn't pay too much attention to the Brett Tabke model. Mike Grehan takes that theory and rips it apart.

As per the doorways if they are just a product or service description I wouldn't call them a doorway. It's an information page pertaining to a keyword you are optimizing for :D .

If it's a 3rd party domain doorway that links to your product or service then it's a dedicated linking page to push link pop with link text. If you do use a 3rd party it's fine to link into the core from it but just don't link from the core site to the 3rd party site..

[Marcia]

if they are a large corporate site I seriously doubt you making two doorway pages will probably hurt them. just get lots of keyword rich links pointing into the doorway pages from lots of sites.
I do believe there is an immunity factor, but just being a large corporation doesn't guarantee immunity. Having orphaned doorway pages is risky for any site - technically the search engines frown on those, as with any type of pages created solely for the purpose of getting rankings. It's a fine line, but those are on the unsafe side of the line. In fact, they're riskier than good cloaking because they're far easier to detect.

Just make additional legitimate content pages that look the same as the rest of the site and are integrated into the normal site navigation - at least from some of the navigation. Optimize those pages, link out from them to the important pages on the site, and get links to them for anchor text and PR.

Mike Grehan takes that theory and rips it apart.
Is there a link to an article by MG about that?

[seomike]

Marcia It's in his book

[Nacho]

Marcia It's in his book
Can you please be a little more specific (eg. page, chapter, quotes, etc.)?

Thanks!

[Nacho]

OK. I've gone back to my copy of the book and researched what I think you may be talking about. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

In Mike Grehan's Search Engine Marketing Book (http://www.search-engine-book.co.uk/) 2nd edition, he talks about "The Term Vector Database and its effect on the search engine optimisation community." and primarily focusing on how the every time he came across the explaination of the the theory of 'themed' web sites and the 'term vectors' both words 'theme' and 'vector' are being confused to that of search engine and information retreival science is all about.

So, just for clarification purposes, and unless you note otherwise. I did not read anything to your exact text that Mike analyses Brett's model as you said:

I wouldn't pay too much attention to the Brett Tabke model. Mike Grehan takes that theory and rips it apart.
From my reading perspective, Mike Grehan does a fabulous job in explaining the differnces rather than ripping anything appart.

I think Brett's analysis from a navigation structure, regardless of what it's called, is very well thought out and planned to increase the search engine's ability to determine what pages have parent/child relationship within the same keyword related topic.

By taking Dj Morri's post and relating it to this site structure analysis, I think that he can easily add a spinoff page to the related topic's page to attract traffic for a specific and unique keyword. However that page must be ethically optimized and linked to the parent page. This does not mean that this page should not have any addtional inbound links to it, on the contrary, the more the better as long as this child page does not compete for other secondary keywords that might make those pages be less important in the SE algorithmic analysis.

[I, Brian]

Brett's model is good for focussing on different topic areas within a site. Mike's comments, IMO, support why doing that with a big site is better than breaking up a big site into little "themed" websites.

Btw - isn't "landing page" a term used for pages targeted for by advertising and linking, and does not necessarily imply "doorway pages" or any kind of redirect? Or have I misunderstood the terminology here?