Online Advertising

Doorway page

Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamdexing, this is, for spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending you to a different page. They are also known as landing pages, bridge pages, portal pages, zebra pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and by other names. Doorway pages that redirect visitors without their knowledge use some form of cloaking.

If you click through to a typical doorway page from a search engine result page, in most cases you will be redirected with a fast Meta refresh command to another page. Other forms of redirection include use of Javascript and server side redirection, either through the .htaccess file or from the server configuration file. Some doorway pages may be dynamic pages generated by scripting languages such as Perl and PHP.

Doorway pages are often easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings. Sometimes a doorway page is copied from another high ranking page, but this is likely to cause the search engine to detect the page as a duplicate and exclude it from the search engine listings.

Because many search engines give you a penalty for using the META refresh command, some doorway pages just trick you into clicking on a link to get you to the desired destination page.

More sophisticated doorway pages, called Content Rich Doorways, are designed to gain high placement in search results without utilizing redirection. They incorporate at least a minimum amount of design and navigation similar to the rest of the site to provide a more human-friendly and natural appearance. Visitors are offered standard links as calls to action.

Many sites now use content rich doorway pages for their pay-per-click campaign landing pages. These doorway pages may employ server side scripting to count click-throughs, visits, and other user actions to assist with marketing data collection.

See also

• Cloaking
• Keyword stuffing
• Page hijacking
• Spamdexing

External links

• What are doorway pages?
• Doorway pages: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
• Russian site about doorway pages(Russian)

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