By : Nidhi Gupta

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 bridge pages, portal pages, zebra pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and by other names.

Some search engine optimizers complain that doorway pages clutter up the search results and, therefore, devalue them for surfers. That view is not without a factual basis. But only in the past it used to be true that a site could dominate the top results with doorway pages, but that was a failing of the search engines. It used to be possible for site to have 5 or more doorway pages in the top 10 results, and sometimes it was much worse. For instance, when localized Altavistas first appeared, some sites’ doorway pages would occupy the top 30, 50 and even more results.

Altavista cleaned up their act and good search engines don’t display more than two pages from the same site in the search results for a given searchterm. So doorway pages from a single site cannot clutter up the results. They can fill the top rankings, of course, but not all from the same site. Some people claim that this is cluttering up and devaluing the results for surfers by reducing the relevancy of the results, but they really aren’t thinking straight. What difference does it make if a site’s doorway page or content page occupies a top ranking? None. A relevant page from the site is listed; that’s all. It doesn’t devalue the results in any way. Let me give a practical example.

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