a Verbat company
a Verbat company
Search Engine Optimization - Doorway and gateway pages
Although opinions vary wildly on that assumption that during the early stages of internet evolution, doorway and gateway pages in certain cases had partly served some legitimate functions. The word partly is being stressed because the doorway and gateway pages has always been regarded as illegal and forbidden on most major Internet search engines. However they are still, in fact are more seen nowadays than previously.
Nevertheless, it was not a refraining factor for some individuals or organizations from using pages similar to doorway or gateway pages. The fact is that some continue to use them illegally which in turn create increase the spamming levels in the search engines. Let us take a quick look on how the doorway and gateway pages created? A glance at some of search engine positioning (SEO) company web sites will speak the fact that all of them promise to deliver you high rankings in most major search engines. It is quite a common fact that they try to achieve this by creating "gateway pages" or “doorway pages” hoping that this process will aid in attaining higher rankings for a the targeted website. The so called pages are created by such SEOP companies are absolutely not related of your existing pages. These pages are loaded with certain keyword and key phrases which such companies believe will drive in more traffic to your site.
As an advancement of this process they then submit such illegal doorway pages to the major Web search engines. Such pages are non- clickable by definition. Its meager occurrence is supposed to increase your rankings. Hence we strongly advise not to practice the use of any doorway or gateway pages. In reality, these pages will perhaps get you in trouble at some point in time. Moreover, they are listed as unethical and hence prohibited by all major search engines. You must be wondering why such stringent codes are set forth by the search engines in this regard. This section of our website explains why.
Majority of SEOP companies use certain automated programs, which incorporate some general templates that they edit with. They consider these programs to be most appropriate identification of your industry keywords and key phrases, besides other basic text. Such automated programs then output a (so-called) "results page" that, they claim, will rank high for a particular engine. The entire process, which consumes enormous amount of time, energy and effort, is constantly repeated for every single major search engine. At times, these so-called website positioning companies also has a practice of creating supplementary and diverse doorway pages (the same as gateway pages), yet again using a different set of "results pages" processed by the said automated programs.
While creating doorway and gateway pages, these processes are expected to tell webmasters about the keyword density each engine should benchmark. This benchmark should be based on past results, and number of times the sensitive keyword phrases should be added to the incorporated text and Meta tags of the gateway (doorway) pages. By this time a question that everyone would have in mind is whether the gateway and doorway pages are really worth to be put up accounting the time, expense and efforts.
By virtue of the above information, you would definitely agree to the fact that this is absolutely not worth and is a real waste of time. The idea of the search engine service provider is same as any of the search engine dependent client – offer well-written Web sites that hold respectable, valuable content to answer the search.
Given a real scenario, 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. According to rule, any Web site that is filled with good and valuable content will, rank high in most of the major Internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Alta-Vista and DMOZ, etc. Consider that, engine spiders (or crawlers) such as Googlebot, Freshbot and all the similar engines, are in the process of looking for useful content the minute they "step into a site".
Out of experience it can be said that 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. However, collectively these numbers are said to have a very small impact in your site rankings. If we allocate a fair share of attention of attention to these automated programs, we might see that most of our client's sites have inaccurate keyword density for certain engines. For example, the program will indicate that specific pages possibly have too many keywords while some others don't have enough. In the past we have encountered with several instances in this regard, both site owners and webmasters need not worry about such facts. If your company or business already has a Web site exceeding 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 the said website. When a website is being optimized, we always consider this very important rule in the process. At times in reality, there are technical issues as of why each page of a site cannot be a gateway.
With the 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 real, because they are being linked from your main page, and you actually want people to read them in the first place. Such pages should offer enough useful information about your business, your products and the people that work for it. It also leaves without saying that all the pages of the website should be easy and "user-friendly" to navigate.
It is said that creation of doorway and gateway pages which are not linked to the rest of the website and don't provide important information about your site are, not just unnecessary, it has increased chances of harming your site's rankings. It has been noticed that it happens more than once, especially in some of the spider-type engines. In real what such typical gateway pages do is generate spam and unnecessary files in the engines. Though this may seem strange for some of you but that is what happens in real. Since 2001, few search engines such as AltaVista have already initiated to take a stringent call opposing doorway and gateway pages by not allowing them in any way and by actually deleting them from their databases. Such developments have put a number of search engine placement companies suddenly out of business as they used similar practices. HIM Technologies strictly recommends that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has to be taken up with due seriousness adhering the SE environment. Hence, the use of doorway and gateway pages has to be kept far at all times.
To give a specific example, in February of 2006 Google has prevented access to the BMW.de site when Google alleged the German automobile giant of trying to manipulate its search results with the use of doorway and gateway pages. For the said reason, BMW's website was effectually prevented from appearing in Google's search results pages. The site owner realized the mistake and took necessary action to adhere to search engine standards.
