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

Posted by admin on Sunday, January 23rd, 2011