Doorway pages - Definition

Doorway pages are web pages that are created to rank high in search engines for particular phrases with purpose to seduce or hoax you to watch another page. They are also known as bridge pages, portal pages, zebra pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and by other names.

If you click to get a typical doorway page from the search engine result pages in most cases you will be redirected with a fast meta refresh command to another page. Doorway pages are easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings. Sometimes a doorway page is copied from another high ranking page, but this is likely to cause the search engine to detect the page as a duplicate and exclude it from the search engine listings.

Because many search engines give you a penalty for using meta refresh command some doorway pages just hoax you to click on a link to get more information or they use "code-swapping". Sometimes called "bait-and-switch". It means you submit an optimized page and wait to get listed and afterwards change the page on the server to a "real" page. The downside is that a search engine may revisit at any time, and if it indexes the "real" page, the position may drop.

You could also "meta jack" a webpage. It's simply taking meta tags from a another high ranking page to yours, but it will not guarantee a high ranking. Cloaking is also a form of doorway pages technique.

See also: Search engine optimization