Should I use Hidden Doorway Pages?
The use of hidden doorway pages used to be a trick employed by crafty web masters several years ago and some still try today to fool the Search Engines. Today the Search engines have caught up with such trick and mostly forged ahead of webmasters tricks which has turned this into a cat and mouse game of continual catch up
The Search engines such as Google have made leaps and bounds over the past few years in developing their methods of indexing, spidering and are now leading the other search engines with its highly sophisticated methods of checking, indexing, and listing websites. To keep ahead of smart webmasters and SEO companies that had been using clever manipulative techniques to get their clients websites to the top of the listings. It is now extremely difficult to get a handle on what Google are doing and the race has turned into a cat and mouse chase with Jerry the mouse being seen as Google and the webmasters and SEO companies are seen to be Tom the Cat who are always chasing the tail of Google's algorithm and continual stream of updates.
It's a hard chase and to keep up with the constant speed of change it is a full time job for SEO companies to attempt to keep abreast of changes and more importantly try to predict changes and to anticipate future developments so as to advise clients as best as possible.
What is a hidden door way page?
Webmasters sometimes are instructed or create and submit "bridge" pages or "doorway" pages to search engines to improve traffic to client's websites. These are certainly perceived as Black hat techniques. Doorway pages can be created to be optimised for certain keywords and for particular commercial phrases. They are also sometimes known as portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages. Such doorway pages are easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings, they basically don't carry navigation and images and only carry keywords and key phrases that it is hoped that Search Engine Bots index and award page ranking and relevance.
The problem is that if the Search Engine look closer at any hidden doorway pages that have been specifically designed to drive traffic to your main site and are not actual sites in their own right for visitors to actually use then this will be assumed to be SPAM and as such you run the risk of having the doorway site removed from their DBS and potentially being punished by demoting your main site and even removing you all together if you are caught out.
Increasingly, Search Engines such as Google are employing human beings to evaluate search results and review websites that are high up on the listings and if a human looks at your doorway site they can quickly determine what you're up to. In short webmasters and SEO companies used to be able to fool a machine such as spider but they can't easily fool a human being.
!The effort required in trying to conceal and create subversive tactics and additional door way pages would be extensive and quite frankly you are better to devote that time and resources and money to developing and optimising your main site with ethical white hat techniques which are the right path to take
Use of JavaScript |
Use of CSS |
Primary Keyword Layout
Pretty Sites v Spider Friendly Sites |
Correct use of Robots.txt File |
Dead Pages & 404 Not Found Errors |
Using Images for Primary Navigation
Correct Use of Home, Sitemap & Contact Page Links |
Use of Redirection Pages
Use of Small Type Fonts |
Should I use Hidden Doorway Pages?
Should I Use HTML Frames? |
Spider Friendly URL's
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