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Lately, using doorway pages to gain top search engine
positioning has become a major topic in Web circles.
Doorway pages, also known as entry or bridge pages,
are Web pages designed specifically to rank highly on
the unique ranking algorithms of each search engine.
They are often identified with spammers - at least until
now.
Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch (http://www.searchenginewatch.com)
recently featured the use of doorways by State Farm
Insurance, the leading US auto insurance firm, to get
to the top of search results for insurance related searches.
State Farm did get the top positions, securing the first
and second positions for "auto insurance"
on Excite, Infoseek, HotBot, and Lycos, plus the first
and second positions for a number of other phrases like
"life insurance", "boat insurance",
"home insurance", and "car insurance".
Everything was going great for State Farm, its doorway
pages generating an extra 100,000 unique new users in
11 months.
This being the first time that a major corporation has
been publicly exposed for using techniques associated
with spamming, many Web promoters were curious to know
what the search engine companies would say about it.
What they heard was the best piece of good news they
have had in a long time.
According to interviews with search engine executives
in the Search Engine Watch, the search engines seem
to have adopted a whole new healthy attitude towards
doorway pages!
As long as your doorway pages do not promote keywords
or phrases that have nothing to do with your Web site's
content, and that you do not submit too many doorways
with the same keyword and clog up the search results,
you are free to go for it!
In other words, if your doorways help search engine
users to find what they are looking for without being
deceived no one will penalize you. (Watch out for Infoseek,
though. It doesn't like it when your doorways redirect
users to a new location without their intervention,
e.g. using the META refresh tag or a CGI).
The reason doorway pages are such a hot issue is that:
- Over 95% of Web users find what they are looking
for by visiting the top 6 search engines. Yahoo alone
handled over 55 million searches and page views in
December 1997. Everybody knows that even a few good
positions on even one or two important keywords or
phrases can drive thousands or hundreds of thousands
of quality visitor traffic to a Web site per day.
- The search engines are overflowing. They have too
many pages in their indexes and they do not do a very
good job of giving the users what they are looking
for. Often, a good Web site may be given a low ranking
by a search engine, and a very bad Web site in the
same subject area be ranked highly! Sometimes the
only way the good site can rank higher is by using
doorways.
- Research has shown that people hardly ever go past
the top 30 search results for any one search. The
top 10 results receive 78% more traffic than those
in position 11 to 30. The top 30 results get over
90% of the search traffic. This alone explains why
some sites do so well and others so disappointingly,
and why it is so critical to be ranked highly.
- Creating doorway pages is one of those elusive things
in life. It can be done, but it no longer is as easy
to cheat the search engines as it used to be back
in 1995! It now takes some considerable time studying,
tracking, testing and reverse-engineering search results.
Those that get it right are handsomely rewarded!
Doorway pages are definitely very effective Web promotion
tools. But they are also controversial, misunderstood
technically and ethically, and can sometimes do more harm
than good when abused. Nobody really knows 100% what the
best approach to all this is.
Doorways are not inherently good or bad, it is how they
are used that is. In good use, they help people find what
they are looking for. They also solve some serious weaknesses
in search engines. You could, for example, have a site
on parenting. But because your site may be made almost
entirely of dynamically generated pages (database or CGI
driven), behind a membership system, be highly graphical,
of have long editorial text that scores poorly with search
engines, your site will go unnoticed by search engines.
It may be the best site on parenting, but the engines
will rank it very poorly.
Doorways here can give you the justice you deserve. And
until search engines learn to properly index dynamic content,
images, pages with long text, password protected pages,
and, best of all, learn to rate and weight in the entire
site's content and factor it into the search results,
doorways are the best solution for many webmasters. |
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