Down With Doorway Pages

Lately many black hat SEOs have begun bringing back the practice of using doorway pages to create large, rapid, increases in website traffic. For many noobs this sounds lie the perfect solution to their traffic needs, the problem however is they may not really know what doorway pages are or why they can be lethal to their business. Here’s a short history lesson on doorway pages.

Doorway pages were nearly gone the way of the dinosaur until the last two years when the demand for SEO experts reached the point it was worth it, in the minds of some black hatters, to revive this old practice. Doorway pages are fairly easy to create as it is basically nothing more than a way of creating more entry points to your website. To many people that sounds good, the problem however is doing so in this manner can kill your reputation and business.

By creating doorway pages, search engines begin registering your site as an authority because it appears as if you have thousands of pages of content. The problem is they are all smoke and mirrors – and almost everyone has experienced them firsthand. If you ever searched a word, let’s use “inexpensive shoes” as an example that wound up going somewhere that had nothing to do with inexpensive shoes then you know exactly what we are discussing.

The pages that are used to create doorways are usually just gibberish- strings of keywords that serve no purpose but to fool the search engines. When a real visitor clicks on them they find they have been redirected to the parent site. If you don’t think the misdirection tactic is reason enough to avoid this black hat cloaking tactic, consider these these reasons:

If you are caught using doorway pages you will most likely be banned from search engines. Imagine losing all of your traffic that comes through Google overnight.

Your business reputation will be tarnished – nobody likes a person that willfully manipulates the system using banned tactics.

Finally, If you lose traffic and you lose a good reputation in the community you lose money. You may even find that in the future link exchanges with other sites is nearly impossible because nobody wants to be guilty by association. The promise of instant success is alluring, but the reality of long term defeat is exponentially more sobering.

Don’t be a black hat and risk losing all your hard work! It’s really not worth it. Doorway pages need to become a thing of the past, so you can start building a solid future for your website based on solid, white hat tactics that won’t end in destruction!