May 23 2009
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages (bridge pages) are specifically created for spamming the index of a search engine. They target the search engine and not the human viewer.
A typical doorway page will use a meta refresh to redirect the visitor to another page on the site. Javascript and server side redirections are also commonly used.
Links to the doorway pages are not contained in the site navigation. The pages are found by visitors clicking through from search engines’ results pages.
Often viewers arrive at doorway pages by searching for a specific term such as ‘garden furniture’. The page they are confronted with will probably contain very little information about that product but there will be a large link saying ‘click here’ or a meta refresh will take them to a relevant page.
Doorway pages are often just copies of other high ranking pages on the site but these are easy to spot by the search engines due to the duplicate content. Such pages are unlikely to be indexed.
‘Content rich doorway pages’ usually contain a small amount of the main site’s design and navigation which creates a natural appearance and is more appealing to the human eye. These should not be confused with ‘landing pages’ which have been specifically created to direct traffic for SEO and PPC campaigns.
Caroline Bell
SEO Programmer
