The door page (also: jump page, link door page, mirror page and Doorway Page in English) refers to a web page that is inserted in front of the real page in order to direct users to a specific landing page. Often attempts are made to get the attention of search engines through hallway pages or doorway pages. However, this method is contrary to Google's quality guidelines.
How to build a door page
Door pages contain large amounts of text and they are generally visually quite poor. Design items and videos are often missing and graphics, if they exist, are used to include keywords in alt text. Items such as Flash or JavaScript, which cannot be easily read by Google, are not included. The content is very diverse for door pages. Initially, they basically consisted of sequences of relevant keywords or irrelevant texts, with keywords randomly distributed throughout. Even if a door page contained useful content, it was always just content regurgitated from the main web portal. They don't have as much added value as over-optimized keyword pages.
Door pages are (typically) highly optimized to rank well in search engines. Generally, such a page is of no value to users, since the content of the actual page is only repeated there. Doorway pages are generally not internally linked and can only be accessed through search engines. There are only one or more links from the door page to the main page. If visitors come to a web portal through a doorway page, there is generally no going back. Door pages represent one-way streets, so to speak.
Advantages of door pages
Doorway pages show some real benefits when it consists of Flash and JavaScript-based websites. Google cannot read texts on such websites. In this circumstance, door pages can be created that contain the same content than the actual web portal and that can be read by search engines. The web portal can now be indexed.
However, door pages are commonly misused, usually in connection with redirects. These pages are optimized for certain keywords and typically include spamming or spamming keywords and similar methods. A doorway page will appear in the Google index and is intended to attract the curiosity of the visitors and attract them to the page. In reality, despite everything, visitors will not be able to see the indexed page at all, because the site operators installed a redirect to the home page. The door page is skipped and is never shown to users. Thus, it is only visible to the search engine.
Importance for SEO
From the point of view of the Google search engine, door pages are of low quality due to the lack of added value for users. Door pages are frustrating and manipulative for most users. Google removes such pages from the search engine index immediately upon detecting this violation of the webmaster guidelines.
Door pages are usually part of the cloaking method and are considered black hat SEO. Door pages are still used, but they lose more and more attractiveness, since Google ensures through manual actions that the websites that use them have to endure sometimes exhausting penalties.
Over time, doorway pages have been increasingly replaced by landing pages. Although this serves an equivalent purpose, it differs greatly in the way it is accomplished. Usually these pages offer specific information on a desired topic to a very specific target group. At the same time, the landing pages are linked to the home page, so no they are a one way street. As a general rule, landing pages do not include redirects that are unrecognizable to users.
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