Your Question is “What are doorway pages? How does it impact in SEO?” well Let’s discuss.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is primarily concerned to get higher rankings for a website so as to enjoy the benefits such as higher traffic, more potential customers, more conversions and better revenue realisation.

SEO helps websites to attain aforementioned goals through various ways. Once a user searches something on a search engine, he types in certain keywords.

He gets the search results and clicks on a chain of low quality pages which would land him to a final page which contains the desired results which satisfies his query.

These low-quality pages or group of pages or even entire websites are optimised to rank well for particular keywords. Such pages are called as Doorway pages.

Doorway pages offer little value to its visitors and they serve the purpose of enhancing SEO value.

Designed primarily for search engines, they are easy to identify as they are of not much use to human beings. Occasionally, a doorway page might be copied from another high ranking page. This may cause the page to be detected as a duplicate and the search engine might exclude it from its listings.

Also, there are Content Rich Doorways, which are more sophisticated. Such pages are designed in such a way as to get high rankings in search results without using any redirection. These pages ensure a minimum amount of design and navigation similar to the rest of the site which makes them appear more natural and human friendly. Visitors to such pages are offered standard links such as calls to action.

To understand Doorway pages better, let us take an example. Take an e-commerce site which sells computer hardware. This site might have a doorway page which is optimised for search item like “computer monitor”. This doorway page contains the phrase “computer monitor” in its content and title tag.

But the page just acts as a hub. The page may contain links to other pages, deeper in the site, which list all types of computer monitors for sale. This doorway page doesn’t provide any original information or valuable content about this product category. This in a way would not have much impact on the buying experience.

On the contrary, this has an inhibiting effect on a user’s buying experience because it adds unwanted step(s) to get to the product. This impacts the not only the on-site browsing but also disrupt user’s search experience.

It can be said that Doorway pages are some landing pages which have very low quality content. Their intent is trying to beat a robot (a web crawler in our case) rather than focusing on aiding a human.

Whether a page can be said as Landing or Doorway depends on the publisher’s intent. Landing pages adds value and provide most relevant and specific information to users where as Doorway pages may mislead and deceive and thus tricking more users to visit a particular site.

Not all the doorway pages are harmful, but the ones which are meet the following criteria:

• We cannot access them from anywhere on the website, even not from the website’s navigation.
• Their presentation is not strictly in hierarchical or structural manner.
• User may be immediately redirected to another location by them.
• They adapt spammy content techniques which include spinning or hiding content among others.
• They add a very little value; for instance, a service promised would not be actually provided on that very page.
• They are created on multiple domains, hence in search results, multiple links (of different domains (essentially pointing to the same content) appear for the user. For instance, doorwaypage.com, doorwaypage.org, doorwaypage.edu etc.

How does Doorway Pages impact SEO?

Doorway pages are bad for user experience. In Google’s algorithm, user experience has a huge role to play. User experience also has a huge ranking factor.

Websites which provide a good user experience rank highly as compared to the ones which do not. This is because any search engine, be it Google or any other, aims to show the best, highest quality and most relevant results for a query searched by any user.

But if the inquisitive user is pointed to doorway pages, then it doesn’t suits purpose of the user’s query, thereby leaving the user unsatisfied. And this is something which Google or any other search engine would not want.

Doorway pages don’t show the information immediately. They pass users through unnecessary link chains.

This increases the chances that a user might get frustrated in the middle of his search activity and abruptly abandon the chain in the middle. This way the users don’t really reach the intended website which is placed at the end of the chain.

Since the users don’t have a good experience with Doorway pages and Google gives a lot of weight to user experience; such pages are now penalised by Google. In the year 2015, Google introduced such an algorithm update.

What can be done to avoid a penalty for the use of doorway pages?

• Avoid using multiple domains. It costs more and is considered spammy. Link equity would be spread over places ultimately making it tougher to rank. If multiple domains are used, it should have very sound reasons for doing so.
• Avoid cloaking or redirection. This may be considered spam technique for the user by Google. Also, such redirections might ruin user experience (as the users might not see what they had expected) giving Google all the more reason to rank a website lower.
• Avoid duplicate content. Multiple pages with almost similar content which have low value should be avoided. Unique pages with good quality should be created, be it to serve local region for a company serving at various places.
• Easy navigation. It should be ensured that users are able to navigate easily from one page to another.
• User’s experience. Google considers user experience into account while ranking pages. Hence, a good and smooth user experience would rank more.
• Make sure keywords relate specifically to the page content. Try to focus less on short-tail high traffic attracting keywords. Try to optimise pages and content with specific long-tail keywords to avoid a penalty. This would help in driving more qualified traffic to the website.