Doorway pages (also known as bridge pages, portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, or entrance pages) are web pages designed specifically to manipulate search engine indexes (spamdexing). A gateway page modifies a search engine\’s index by injecting results for certain words while redirecting users to another website. Cloaking is used on doorway sites that route users without their awareness. This is often classified as Black Hat SEO.

If a visitor clicks through to a standard gateway page from a search engine results page, they will often be transferred to another page through a quick Meta refresh command. Additionally, redirection may be accomplished via the use of JavaScript and server-side redirection through the server configuration file. Certain gateway pages may be dynamically produced using scripting languages such as Perl or PHP.

Doorway sites are often simple to recognise since they were created mainly for search engines and not for humans. While a gateway page may sometimes be copied from another high-ranking page, this is likely to lead the search engine to flag the page as a duplicate and remove it from the search engine results.

Due to the penalty imposed by many search engines for employing the META refresh command, some gateway websites either deceive the user into clicking on a link to the intended destination page, or they employ JavaScript to redirect the user.

Advanced gateway sites, dubbed Content Rich Doorways, are meant to get high rankings in search results without the need of redirection. They employ a minimal amount of design and navigation that is consistent with the rest of the site in order to create a more humane and natural look. As a call to action, visitors are presented with conventional links.

Within the literature, landing pages are often conflated with doorway pages. The former are content-rich sites to which traffic is directed as part of pay-per-click advertisements and in order to optimise the effectiveness of SEO initiatives.

Additionally, doorway pages are often utilised on websites that maintain a blacklist of URLs known to include spam, such as Facebook, Tumblr, and Deviantart.

Cloaking

Doorway pages often utilise cloaking methods for the purpose of deception. Cloaked pages will display a version of the page to humans that differs from the one delivered to crawlers—this is often accomplished using server-side scripting. The server can determine if a visitor is a bot, a crawler, or a person based on a variety of signals, including the originating IP address or user-agent. Cloaking will mislead search engines into ranking sites higher for unrelated keywords, while monetizing any human traffic by presenting spammy, often unrelated, material to users. Cloaking is widely regarded to be very manipulative and is strongly discouraged in the search engine optimization business and by search engines, and its usage may result in large penalties or the full removal of websites from indexation.

Redirection

Webmasters that use gateway pages often desire that visitors never see them and are instead directed to a \”genuine\” page on their website. Redirection is sometimes used to accomplish this purpose. This may be as simple as adding a meta refresh tag on entryway pages. A more sophisticated system may make advantage of cloaking. In any instance, such redirection may cause search engines to disregard your gateway pages.

Construction

A content-rich gateway page must be built in a search engine-friendly manner, otherwise it may be seen as search engine spam, resulting in the page being removed from the index for an undetermined period of time.