| When the Internet was still in
its infancy, doorway and gateway pages could, in certain
circumstances, have partly served some legitimate function,
although opinions vary wildly on that assumption. We
say partly because, doorway and gateway pages have always
been illegal and prohibited on most major Internet search
engines. And they still are, in fact even more today
than at any other time.
However, that did not prevent certain individuals
or companies from using doorway or gateway pages (similar).
In fact, some are still illegally using them, in effect
creating a lot of unwanted spam in the search engines.
Just how are doorway and gateway pages created? A quick
verification of some search engine positioning (SEO)
firms' Web sites will reveal to you that all of them
promise to deliver you high rankings in most major search
engines. For some, the way they attempt to do that is
by creating what is called in the industry "gateway
pages" (or doorway pages), in the hope they will
help rankings for a specific corporate Web site. These
are pages created by these firms that are completely
independent of your current pages, which they load with
certain keyword and key phrases that, according to them,
should entail more traffic to your site.
They then submit these (illegal) doorway pages to
the major Web search engines. Those pages are not "clickable"
by definition. Their mere presence is supposed to increase
your rankings. Verbanet strongly advises anybody not
to use any doorway or gateway pages. In fact, they will
probably get you in trouble at some point in time. Besides,
they are illegal and forbidden in all major search engines.
In this section of our Web site, you will find out why.
Most of these companies use some form of automated
programs, which incorporate some general templates that
they edit with, in what they would consider the most
appropriate identification of your industry keywords
and key phrases, along with other basic text. These
programs then output a so-called "results page"
that, they claim, will rank high for a particular engine.
The whole process, which takes a lot of time, energy
and effort is continuously repeated for every single
major search engine! Sometimes these so-called "site
positioning firms" will create additional and different
doorway pages (the same as gateway pages), again using
a different set of "results pages" generated
by the same automated programs they use.
In creating doorway and gateway pages, those processes
are supposed tell some Webmasters what keyword density
each engine supposedly "needs" to look at,
based on past results, and how many times you should
put sensitive keyword phrases into the incorporated
text and meta tags of the gateway (doorway) pages. The
question everyone should ask here is: are gateway and
doorway pages really worth all the time, expense and
effort? It sounds like a lot of unnecessary trouble
and a real waste of time. Carefully remember that each
and every search engine wants to "look" at
the same thing as we all do: well-written Web sites
that contain good, valuable content that is of help
to the Internet search community.
What happens in the real world is, those pages rank
high for numerous keyword phrases regardless of the
correct keyword density or its exact placement in the
text body of the page because they are filled with good
and valuable content. Any Web site that is filled with
good and valuable content will, as a rule, rank high
in most of the major Internet search engines such as
Google, Yahoo, Alta-Vista and DMOZ, etc. Remember that
engine spiders (or crawlers) such as Googlebot, Freshbot
and all the others, always look for good, useful content
the minute they "step into a site".
Experience has taught us there are minor variations
in the number of times a keyword or keyphrase should
appear and how many words should be on a given page.
But, as a whole, those numbers will have a very small
impact in your site rankings. If we gave a lot of attention
to these automated programs, we would probably find
out that most of our client's sites have inaccurate
keyword density for certain engines. For example, the
program could tell us that specific pages possibly have
too many keywords and that others don't have enough.
We have seen instances to that effect in the past and
site owners and webmasters alike should not worry about
those facts.
If your company or business already has a Web site and
if it's more than one page, then you have your own built-in,
natural doorway (gateway) page. Each and every page
of your current site is a doorway to the rest of your
site. When we optimize a site, we always have that very
important rule in mind. In reality, there are sometimes
technical issues why each page of a site cannot be a
gateway.
With your homepage as your basic point of entry, you
simply create other informative pages that link from
the main page to the rest of the site. These are not
gateway pages in the original sense of the word, because
you're linking to them from your main page, and you
actually want people to read them in the first place.
These pages should give useful information about your
business, your products and the people that work for
it. It also goes without saying that all the pages of
your site should be easy and "user-friendly"
to navigate.
Creating doorway and gateway pages that are not linked
to the rest of your site and don't provide important
information about your site are, not only unnecessary,
but may even harm your site's rankings. We have seen
that happen more than once, especially in some of the
spider-type engines. The real action that typical gateway
pages do is create useless spam and uneccessary files
in the engines. This may seem strange for some of you
but that is what it basically does. Since 2001, some
search engines such as AltaVista have already started
to take a stand against doorway and gateway pages by
not allowing them in any way and by actually deleting
them from their databases. Developments such as these
have put a number of search engine placement companies
suddenly out of business. Verbanet strictly recommends
that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) be done correctly,
and that the use of doorway and gateway pages be AVOIDED
at all times.
In February of 2006, Google has prevented access to
the BMW.de site when Google accused the German car manufacturer
of trying to manipulate its search results with the
use of doorway and gateway pages. From that action,
BMW's website was effectively prevented from appearing
in Google's search results pages. BMW said it had done
nothing wrong at the time.
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