SEO Question: What Are Doorway Pages, And Should I Use Doorway Pages?
I want to build a load of doorway pages to focus on a handfu of search terms that i don’t rank very well for. Will this help my SEO and can it backfire as a strategy?
Deeho Says:
If you read Googles best practice you wil see that doorway pages get a mention. Google don’t like doorway pages and they are considered to be a means of manipulating, or trying to manipulate Google SERPs.
Having said that, and now that you know that low quality, spam doorway pages are not a good idea, each of your pages is in ‘essence’ a doorway page for visitors to your site.
A doorway page is a focused page, used as a doorway into your website. Instead of everyone entering your website via the home page, a doorway page is a page that you get found for which might be a product or service page that acts as a traffic generator.
All of your product or services pages should work as doorway pages to provide your visitors with focussed information that they were looking for.
Low Quality Doorway Pages
The doorway pages that Google dislikes most are the sort where you build 100 very similar pages with almost identical content except for locations, so you might want to target 100 towns so you build 100 pages with each town on each.
This is an obvious abuse of the doorway page idea.
Instead, build high quality pages for the towns or products that you want to target, so they offer value to the end user. If it’s a quality page that real visitors engage with then it won’t be treated as a ‘doorway’ spam page by Google.
As with so many other areas of your site, it all comes down to the quality metrics that you build into your pages. If you take short cuts and try to ‘game’ Google then you will inevitably pay the price and suffer in SERPs.
If you build each doorway page thinking instead about how you can make it the best possible content for the search term you are targeting then it stops being a spam page and becomes valuable content instead….. which google likes.
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