Differences between "natural doorway" pages and doorway pages that will get you banned from the search engines.

Many people do not understand that you can have "multiple doorways" into your website. Not everyone is going to "come in" through the "front" homepage. In fact, you can make every single page of your website be its own "miniweb" that has its own target customers, target keywords, and target call to action. These are called "natural doorway pages." Rachel McAlpine explains it like this:

Natural doorway pages have real content. They feel right. They're real pages, not phony ones. When someone lands on your doorway page, it should look like the other pages on the same site. But keep these pages highly focused. Don't stray from the subject, or you weaken the impact of the lead key phrase for that page. Make sure your text is interesting and lively.

Bad Doorway Pages - Getting Banned

Unfortunately, making "bad doorway" pages is way too easy and enticing for too many companies. For example, say you decide to sell your services in every city in New York (even though you are located in California). You create a script that creates 1000 pages that says the following:

Web designer in (put city name here). We are the best web designers in (put city name here), New York. More junk about (place city name here). etc.

Not only is deceptive, this adds no value to the Internet, as a whole, at all. Although you will show up for "web design in Podunk, New York", once the search engines realize what is up, you'll be banned. Google defines "bad doorways" like this:

Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

The key is to have real content, that benefits real people. With an increasing number of "scaper" sites, the search engines will have no choice but to crack down more and more on these type of "no-content" pages. I doubt it will be long before many people that even "slightly" look like they are a scraper site will find themselves without a home in the search engines.  

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Filed Under: Scraper, Doorway, Website Design

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"Differences Between Natural Doorways and Bad Doorways"

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