Hi, I've been reading that you should avoid doorway pages, what are they exactly? I was thinking about having my site at sitename.co.uk but also with another site at samesitename.com, each feeding to the other for relevant info. would this be something the engines would ban ? Thanks
Doorway pages are special pages that web users never see. The are designed purely for the search engines and a stuffed with keywords. They worked well a few years back but not really anymore. Creating 2 versions of a site can be harmful. If you do this make sure that its clear that one version is for one country and one is for another and keep the content as different as possible. I would even go as far as hosting one site in the US and one in the UK.
In my opinion, If you using Doorway pages in the right way your site will not been penalized by search engine. They had been used in a wrong way for a long time ago with combination of Doorways + Redirect. They generated a thousands (or even hundread-thousands) page with heavily optimized for each keywords and specialize to search engine bots to crawl and rank their pages. All generated pages are useless for human. When peoples enter its site they only see useless pages and may be redirected to their main page. (imagine to porn sites optimized for "flowers" and visitors who needed flowers enter their site by searched and found themselves has been misleaded). But for now I think doorway pages generator looks better I didn't use it yet. As I sad, only my opinion.