Sometimes questions will arise around
subject of gateway information pages or doorway pages. People have heard that "doorway pages" are BAD and some have stated that search engines "hate doorway pages". For clarification on these type of issues, let's start by explaining some simple ground rules looking beyond jargon and terminology.
Do Search Engines Hate Doorway/Gateway Pages?
To answer this we'll examine it in two steps.
Let's understand:
1. What it is that Search Engines "HATE"?
and then...
2. What type of pages search engines "LOVE"?
With this approach it will help us gain some understanding of criteria that is most important.
1. What Search Engines HATE:
a) To put it simply, search engines despise low quality doorway pages that contain little or no useful content. A few years ago these type of low quality doorway pages were rampantly produced as a means to try and trick search engines. Looking at it from search engines point of view, why even publish a page if all it contains is a couple of lines of text and an "enter store" link. Pages with VERY LITTLE VALUE to reader, do not belong in a search engine's index.
b) Search engines also despise any kind of duplication or use of mirror pages. Again, little or no content (often just garbled text or keyword rich paragraphs that have no real value) were reproduced over and over and cluttered up search engines. These pages were supposedly going to bring great traffic but bottom line is that they were and still are all labeled by engines as Spam.
c) Search engines hate any attempt made by Webmasters to manipulate pages optimized with content unrelated to actual Web site. Some Webmasters were guilty of all types of trickery to try and attract clicks regardless of site content.
Understanding these issues, clearly you could NEVER blame search engines for their war on Spam and low value doorway pages which contained no useful content or information.
Next let's talk about
2. What pages Search Engines LOVE:
a) Search engines love pages that far "information rich" and contain useful, original content that will actually make valued reading to online visitors.
b) Instead of doorway pages (or pages with no value or little useful content), term "information rich" can be used to describe a page loaded with useful, quality information. Search engines love pages that are content rich and able to stand on it's own merit. A quality information page is also part of overall Web site allowing visitors to obtain more relevant and useful information having easy navigation through Web site.
Instead of lightweight pages with no content, today's pages need to contains high quality information, which is relevant to online audience. The information rich page is 100% quality, put together with research, relevance, thought and care. No tricks are ever needed.
Next Question is..... What kind of information goes into creating an information rich high performance page?
Invariably this question often comes up when I am teaching one of our live hands-on workshops. People need to understand that this is wide open to all discoveries you make while researching your target audiences behavior. How you can meet audience's needs exactly, is only limited to "your imagination" and most effective way to present information you know they are looking for, back too them. You want to give them what they "really want" as opposed to what you "think" they want and do this right up front.
The focus is on creating genuinely "useful content" for your ideal target audience of "potential customers" who happen to be already out there searching for you.
Not only is this what your visitors want, it's also key to success for search engine acceptance. You will never run in to trouble with search engines by offering lots of original, quality content that is interesting, useful and of high value, to your online readers.
In brief, key to success for attracting your target audience, is doing quality research on your target audiences searching behavior and learning to identify their needs and what they are searching for and then, giving them what it is that they really want.
