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Search engines don't rank isolated pages very well, if at all, so
various pages of a well constructed Doorway Domain will all be interlinked with one another. Neither should they be mere clones: duplicate content on any given web site will usually be penalized.
But if, as I claimed above, human visitors don't ever get to see them, how are they supposed to boost your sales? The answer to this is redirection: surfers hitting your Doorway Domain's well positioned link on an engine's search results list will simply be forwarded to
corresponding page on your main site.
"Hey," you may groan now, "hold it! Haven't I read all over
place that search engines take a very dim view of redirects and may actually ban sites from their indices if detected? So what are you trying to propose here - kamikaze optimization?"
You read right: search engines do indeed penalize web sites for redirection! However, there's a fairly easy, well established way out of this, and it goes under various names ranging from "Cloaking" through "IP Delivery" to "Stealth Technology", and others more.
Note that I said it is human visitors who will be redirected, not
search engine spiders. The latter will be served with their optimized "fodder" pages from
Doorway Domain itself and will never know
difference.
There are various technical methods to achieve this. You can employ specialized software which will determine automatically whether a site hit is generated by a search engine spider or a human visitor. If you have administrator rights on your system (most people haven't, but if you're running your own dedicated server this is normally a given), you can tweak your configuration to achieve
same effect, etc.
So you may think of a Doorway Domain as a "cloaked mini-site" fronting for your home page without annoying visitors with that 'ol "Click here to enter" spiel. Remember that many studies indicate that you have only about 8-15 seconds to capture your visitors' attention if you want them to actually stay on your site. If in doubt, check your server's traffic logs! You shouldn't make life more difficult for your visitors than absolutely necessary - it's uncourteous, and it doesn't particularly motivate buyers either!
The technical fineries of cloaking are, unfortunately, beyond
scope of this introductory article, but there's a lot of fine material around which will help you get started if you're interested.
A detailed tutorial on
DOs and DONTs of cloaking can be found on our site at: < http://fantomaster.com/fafaqcloak1.html > There's also a guided tour on cloaking available here (JavaScript enabled browser required): < http://fantomaster.com/fasmbgt0.html >
Note that cloaking is not without its risks! The tutorial mentioned above will explain this in more detail.)
While these risks are widely overrated, they do indeed exist, so you should know exactly what you're doing before you actually go for it. However, once you have become familiar with
technology and seen its fantastic ranking results, you'll hardly settle for less again!

Ralph Tegtmeier is the co-founder and principal of fantomaster.com Ltd. (UK) and fantomaster.com GmbH (Belgium), < http://fantomaster.com/ > a company specializing in webmasters software development, industrial-strength cloaking and search engine positioning services. You can contact him at mailto:fneditor@fantomaster.com