What is Doorway Page?


What You Need to Know about Doorway Page

Google Penalties and Business Risk

Google actively penalizes sites using this tactic through manual actions and core algorithm updates, causing dramatic drops in organic traffic and revenue.

Common Warning Signs

These pages typically contain thin content, minimal unique value, and exist only to capture search traffic before sending visitors to a different destination.

How Search Engines Identify Them

Warning signs include multiple similar pages targeting slight keyword variations, automatic redirects, templated content, and pages that don’t match the searcher’s actual intent.

Historical Context and Evolution

This manipulative approach was common in early SEO when algorithms struggled to assess quality, but modern search engines easily detect and penalize these schemes.

Legitimate Landing Page Alternatives

Create comprehensive, valuable pages that genuinely serve user needs with unique content, clear purpose, and information matching what searchers actually want to find.

Long-Term Business Impact

Sites caught using doorway pages face severe traffic losses, damaged brand reputation, and expensive recovery efforts requiring months to regain lost search visibility.


Frequently Asked Questions about Doorway Page

1. How do doorway pages differ from legitimate landing pages?

Legitimate pages provide unique value and match user intent, while doorway pages exist solely to manipulate rankings and redirect traffic without serving visitors.

2. Can old doorway pages still hurt my site today?

Yes. Google’s algorithms and manual review teams actively identify and penalize this practice regardless of when pages were created or published originally.

3. What should I do if I discover doorway pages on my site?

Remove or consolidate them into comprehensive pages with genuine value, then submit a reconsideration request through Search Console if you received a manual penalty.

4. Are location-specific service pages considered doorway pages?

No, if they provide unique, valuable content for each location. They become doorways when they’re thin, templated copies with minimal useful differentiation.


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Related Terms

Orphan Page

Pages with no internal links pointing to them, making them hard for search engines to discover and index.

Orphan Page

Responsive Design

A web design approach that automatically adapts layout and content to fit any screen size, ensuring optimal user experience across all devices.

Responsive design

Domain

The unique domain name identifying a website. This foundation affects search visibility, crawlability, brand trust, and authority accumulation.

Domain

Domain Name Registrar

A service that registers and manages domain names, providing DNS tools that affect site accessibility and technical SEO setup.

Domain name registrar


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