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Doorway Page

Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamdexing; that is, for spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending you to a different page. They are also known as landing pages, bridge pages, portal pages, zebra pages (a humorous arbitrary coinage by Jill Whalen of High Rankings Advisor), jump pages, gateway pages, and entry pages and by other names. Doorway pages that redirect visitors without their knowledge use some form of cloaking.

If you click through to a typical doorway page from a search engine result page, in most cases you will be redirected with a fast Meta refresh command to another page. Other forms of redirection include use of JavaScript and server side redirection, either through the .htaccess file or from the server configuration file. Some doorway pages may be dynamic pages generated by scripting languages such as Perl and PHP.

Doorway pages are often easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings. Sometimes a doorway page is copied from another high ranking page, but this is likely to cause the search engine to detect the page as a duplicate and exclude it from the search engine listings.

Because many search engines give you a penalty for using the META refresh command, some doorway pages just trick you into clicking on a link to get you to the desired destination page, or they use JavaScript for redirection.

More sophisticated doorway pages, called Content Rich Doorways, are designed to gain high placement in search results without utilizing 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.

Another form of doorway page, is using a method called Cloaking. They show a version of that page to the visitor, but different to the one provided to crawlers, using server side scripts, usually using CGI. They know whether it's a bot or a visitor based on their ip address or user-agent.

Many sites now use content rich doorway pages for their pay-per-click campaign landing pages. These doorway pages may employ server side scripting to count click-throughs, visits, and other user actions to assist with marketing data collection.

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