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Doorways and Portals

Another item that has an appropriate and legitimate use, and a harmful and unwise use.

First of all, I need to define what this is referring to, since these terms are used in more than one way. A doorway page is a single page which links into one or more sites. A Portal is either a large all in one, comprehensive website, or it is a single page that links into a large number of websites.

The bad use for these is when you splatter doorway pages all over the web, to link back to your site, to make it appear that your site has greater link popularity than it actually does. Some people use a doorway page to do this with multiple sites, to imitate content, and they call it a portal. But it is not a true portal site.

If you misuse doorway sites, then one of two things will happen:

The search engines may just ignore the doorway pages as being unimportant - they add no content of value to the web, so they are not even indexed.

Some people say that using them can get your main site banned, others say that it won't. I don't feel it is worth the risk either way, because I don't have time to gamble on a known loser.

The legitimate uses for these are:

Portals are actually large sites that cover a range of related topics, or a large topic in a comprehensive manner. They can be a very successful and highly respected resource online. It is only when they are degraded to web spam that they are not a good thing.

Doorway (or gateway) pages are acceptable if used only as a means of providing a single marketing domain for a large number of quality sites which are owned by the same person. They should never be used as a means of getting multiple links to search engines for a single site. Creating one that links into multiple sites, so that you can put just a single URL on your business card is acceptable, but even then, you ought to put additional content into the site - articles relating to the sites you are promoting, new sites that don't quite justify a separate domain, explanation of your business, etc.

Remember, the search engines want a website to add to the informational substance of the web in a unique way. So any site you create must have a purpose that enhances that objective.