quick question for all the experts regarding the use of doorway pages. A few of my competitor's have extensively used doorway pages, a practice we have not done. Since the Big Daddy roll out began...I have noticed that their doorway pages are no longer ranking and if they are, very very low. Has anyone else who uses doorway pages noticed this trend on the Big Daddy server clusters?
I have heard to just consider landing pages the normal pages of your site, Good changing Content from page to page, links in and out. the 1 keyword changing doorway pages are on there way out. I have heard this from multimple forms admins. Need to make real pages, and keep the QUALITY up.
Correct, build your site for your visitor and let the serps happen. Don't rely on 'tricks' to get rankings... because in the end those tricks will only work a short time and your gonna be sitting on your ass moaning that you got banned.
Well this is probably old news for many, but BMW (the .de domain) were banned from Google for using doorway pages. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ramping-up-on-international-webspam/ Cheers, Paz.
Over the last year I think the issues around doorway pages have become blurred. In the past doorway pages were pages that redirected users to the proper site and used cloaking to show google some keyword stuffed content. Nowadays doorway pages are being replaced by perfectly legitimate landing pages which are highly optimized using titles and h1 tags etc to rank well for a particular keyword. It is important not to confuse the two and also to be aware of just how good landing pages are in terms of getting traffic. Consider a basic website selling electronics items. If each item has its own page optimised for the items name then you get thousands of pages (one for each product) all listed in google. The products are likely to be easier to rank for than the generic category the product belongs to. The end result is thousands of pages each bringing a few visitors resulting in a large boost in traffic.
IMO, the only thing doorway pages do is reduce the PR of your inner pages, and send less targeted traffic to your website... They also piss off your users. If you are going to do serious stuff on the net, they are a complete waste of time.