Google fixes its doorway definition

A while back I criticized Google for saying that doorway pages contain hundreds of outbound links (that would be a crawl or hallway page). While I don’t assume that my criticism evoked any particular response at Google, I’m pleased to see that they have revised their Webmaster guidelines to better reflect the correct definition of a ‘doorway’ page.

Keep in mind that the concept of doorway pages came from the search engine optimization spammer community and for years their use of the term was very precise and specific. Nonetheless, I am very much aware that language is a living thing and words can take on new meaning.

However, new meanings typically arise from experimental use that catches on. Google’s definition of a doorway containing hundreds of outbound links just didn’t make sense and if people had picked up that definition and started using it there would have been needless confusion in the Webmastering community.

Now Google is a little more ambiguous but more technically correct in saying: “Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.”

I agree completely. That is what doorway pages are and, yes, Virginia, they do often occur in large numbers.

For the record, Yahoo!’s definition of doorway pages leaves something to be desired. Doorway pages don’t necessarily redirect the user (although usually they do). A doorway page MIGHT just be a static page with a simple call to action (but I don’t often see that type of doorway any more — perhaps it didn’t prove to be as cost-effective as the redirecting doorway page styles).

Microsoft doesn’t seem to forbid the use of doorway pages in their Webmaster guidelines. I think that’s a mistake, Microsoft. I hope to see your guidelines improve in that area.

Doorway pages can be helpful when you’re learning about search engine optimization and on-page factors, but you should not (in my opinion) use them to promote a legitimate business site. Instead, you should consider learning the valuable lessons they are able to teach and then apply those principles to your Web page design.

A great deal of the doorway page’s strength comes from its simplicity and highly focused topicality (doorways that jam hundreds of unrelated keywords together are not very useful, in my opinion, but spammers may disagree with me since I myself have written about the broadness of page relevance scope).

A doorway page may be pointed to by many crawler pages — an old trick that helped inspire link farms, but which is still used today for more “legitimate” content.

A doorway page may be dressed up to look like a natural part of an active Web site — we used to call those content-rich doorways but now they are just called landing pages. There is nothing wrong with having landing pages on your site but since they are most often now used for PPC campaigns it’s better to NOT have them indexed so that you can better track your ROI.

Just because you’re creating doorway pages is not a bad thing. They have their uses. But they do clutter up search results and as a searcher I don’t want to see doorway pages in my results. We can find a happy medium by eliminating the spam aspects of doorway engineering and emphasizing the marketing aspects. You can create doorway pages for organic SEO that act as natural entry points to a Web site, but these doorways have to act like entry points — they cannot redirect.

We can call them entry pages to distinguish them from PPC landing pages if the term doorway page seems too spammy to you. An entry page typically has several features that distinguish it from traditional spammy doorways:

1. The entry page is fully integrated into the Web site’s navigation system.
2. The entry page is designed for human consumption. It looks just like every other page on your site in terms of design theme.
3. The entry page hides nothing.
4. The entry page contains an extended call to action — 2 to 3 paragraphs of text that show the visitor they have found the site they are looking for and make a low-key sales pitch.

Entry Pages still share some of the traditional doorway page attributes:

1. Entry Pages emphasize one keyword (but because of their on-page text they are weakly relevant to many expressions).
2. Entry Pages are short, sweet, and to the point.
3. Entry Pages may be created in volume.

I’ve said more than once that there is nothing wrong with volume but there are drawbacks to entry pages that you want to take into consideration before deciding you’ve found the magic SEO formula.

For example, every entry page stands between the visitor and the conversion. It’s an additional step. Depending on what your site offers you may or may not be able to reduce this impairment by including an appropriate form on your entry page. Just understand that it’s NOT an entry page if there is not another page behind it. The entry page should exist only because you cannot reasonably get the right page to rank (which is an entirely different discussion).

Another drawback to entry pages is that people tend to overuse them. Creating more buffers between your market and your converting content is not, in my opinion, an ideal marketing practice. You want to use as few entry pages as possible. Your goal should be to improve the design of your converting content so that it naturally attracts relevant traffic. But there are limits to what you can do.

Entry pages need to create some value for the visitor — not so that the search engines will accept them but so that people won’t mind landing on them. The value may be the sales pitch or the call to action. It may be something else (call it a “featurette value” that just makes the page more interesting).

If a reasonable person would confuse your entry page with a doorway page, then you’ve done it wrong. Entry pages are not spammy doorway pages. Entry pages are windows of opportunity for you to build a relationship with every person who finds your Web site through an obscure query.