What is Doorway?

What are doorway pages? A doorway is a web page or an entire site that is keyword-stuffed with one or more queries in order to get to the top of search engines. Such search engine spam is used to further redirect from the doorway to other sites, usually to advertise some kind of products or services. Doorways are most often used as a cheap source of search traffic.

What is a Doorway

In essence, a doorway is an intermediate resource, useless to the user, which is promoted in the top search results through the use of doorway pages in SEO. For example, such a page may contain a large amount of incoherent text with a large number of keywords needed to quickly get to the top of Google search results. This “polluting” information wastes the resources of search engines: a user often has no time to become acquainted with the content of a spam page, because they are automatically redirected to another resource, which is promoted using the doorway.

Since the creation and use of such spam refers to black-hat optimization, doorways can be banned or de-ranked by search engine assessors and their anti-spam algorithms. This policy of the major search engines is due to the fact that it is a deception of users, often for profit. Google’s guidelines note that the use of such a method of redirecting users is considered search engine spam.

However, if the doorway is well-organized and works for the convenience of users, for some time it may well meet the requirements of search engines. In this case, the page to which the doorway redirects cannot be removed from the index in any case. An exception may be pages where the doorway is located on a subdomain of the main address.

How Doorways appear

What is a doorway page: a doorway is a way to quickly and cheaply gain an audience from search engines. As a rule, not one, but hundreds or even thousands of such spam sites are created. There are a variety of programs of this specialization: free and paid. They use different technologies and may have different additional functions, but the essence is the same — the automatic creation of web pages to spam the search engines.

How a doorway differs from a standard website: depending on the templates and capabilities of the generator, a doorway can look similar to a typical website. The main differences between a doorway and a website:

• It is not useful to visitors, designed only to get traffic and make money on it;
• Its only purpose is to rank high on keywords, attract visitors to this topic, and redirect them to PPC or an affiliate program;
• It is generated automatically by special software.

Search engines consider doorways a violation of their rules, trying to find them among the decent sites and remove them from the search index (banned).

Types of Doorways

There are quite conventional divisions of doorway types:

• Illegal (“black doorways”) — sites that redirect traffic from search engines to the pages of various affiliate programs or other services to monetize.
• Semi-legal (“grey doorways”) — sites that have a certain number of links to affiliate resources where monetization is happening.
• Legal (“white doorways”) — a site that provides high-quality, relevant, and useful information, accompanied by relevant (thematic) links to affiliate programs. Legal doorways can also include sites that redirect visitors to online shopping sites and receive a percentage for the lead. In fact, a competent doorway is an aggregator. But in any case, the legality of doorways is quite conditional, because even well-designed spam pages will be in search results for a limited time, and then you will have to create new ones to replace those banned.

Conclusions

Search traffic from doorways is very high quality, and if you can promote the site pages to the top for commercial queries, the conversion will be very high. But also creating doorways for low-frequency informational queries is profitable, due to the ratio of the cost of generation and hosting to the amount of income. You can see this by reading our cases on earnings.

If you are looking for a doorway page example, we recommend you check out MelBet Affiliates. This one will cover a whole thematic area with its effect. The doorway effect will practically not diminish over time.