What are Doorway Pages, then?
Doorway pages or, for short, “doorways”, are basically just what the term implies: gateways to the web site proper. (Actually, another common term for doorway pages is “gateway pages” or “gateways”.) Typically, a doorway may consist of a graphic and a welcome message plus a “Click here to enter the site” type of link. More sophisticated doorway pages will also contain a site map. The trick behind doorways (and an explanation why they are so popular) lies in their source code: they will normally be optimized for web positioning in their headers, with meta tags containing keywords and page descriptions. Frequently, a peek into the source code will also reveal some invisible text, though this is generally frowned upon by the search engine operators and by quite a few SEO professionals. A more acceptable practice is the inclusion of invisible links in the doorway page — such links serve as an invitation to the search engine spider to crawl more individual pages of the submitted web site. A
