Top 10 SEO myths
Myth and misconception No. 8: Doorway pages
"Doorway and gateway pages will do all the work for us"
This article is accurate as/of January 10, 2003
CORRECTION:
A couple of years ago, this was partly true. We say partly because, doorway and gateway
pages have always been illegal and prohibited on most major Internet search engines. And they still are.
However, that did not prevent certain individuals or some companies from using doorway
(or gateway pages- similar). In fact, some are still illegally using them, in
effect creating unwanted spam in the search engines.
How doorway and gateway pages are created
A quick verification of most search engine positioning (SEO) firms' Web sites will reveal
to you that all of them promise to deliver you high rankings in most major Internet search
engines. 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 (illegal) pages created by these firms that are
completely independent of your current pages, which they load with certain keyword
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. GCIS strongly does NOT recommend the use of 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 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, wich takes a lot of time, energy and effort is continuously repeated for every single major search engine. These site positioning outfits will even go to the painstaking task of creating 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.
Doorway and gateway pages and keyword density
In creating doorway and gateway pages, those processes tell 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 it is,
if you want our opinion. Carefully remember that each and every search engine wants to
"look" at the same thing: bonafide and 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, Teoma... etc. Remember that engine spiders (or crawlers) such as Googlebot and others, always look for good, useful content the minute they "step into a site".
Major Web search engines use algorithms
To be sure, 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 GCIS optimizes 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. However, there's no excuse for having your main page be so technically challenged that the search engines can't find it and index it properly.
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.
Doorway and gateway pages can be a very costly lesson
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 clutter in the engines. This may seem strange for some of you but that is
what it basically does. In our daily duties as
SEO professionals, we as humans also
have to use the engines as much as anybody else. As a result, we are as frustrated by
the lack of good content and hard-to-find Web sites we sometimes experience.
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. GCIS strictly recommends that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) be done correctly, the first time.
Doorway and gateway pages are illegal in all major search engines such as Google, Teoma, Alta-Vista... etc. They are considered unethical in the SEO community. Why would anybody want to create useless pages with no content in them ? If you want your visitors to find, and then visit and read the useful content on your pages, leave all the SEO to a professional firm. Click here to visit the GCIS Web site.
Feel free to contact us if you have any question or comment.
The only way to get a much higher, prioritized ranking in all major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Alta-Vista and the others is to invest in a quality SEO program done by professionals. Contact GCIS.
Click here for additional important facts on Internet search engines.
Bring a lot more potential customers to your Web site with our award-winning Pagina+™ SEO service and priority site positioner solution. Pagina+™ is now in it's 2.0 version.
Click here for all the information on effective SEO keyword searches.
If you need complete and updated information on any Internet technology subject, we strongly suggest you bookmark our site address: www.gcis.ca or better still, make it your default Home Page start-up address in your Internet browser.
| Home
| Portfolio
| Domain names
| Solutions
| Training
| Our technologies
| Français |
