An Ethical Alternative to "Doorway Pages" – Affiliate Programs
An Ethical Alternative to "Doorway Pages"
Scott Smigler
Definition: A doorway page is content created specifically for the purpose of garnering high placements in the search engines.
Issue: Google makes the following specific recommendation: Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content http://www.google.com/intl/az/webmasters/guidelines.html.
This article addresses the issue of doorway pages, proposes an acceptable alternative and offers some insights into the basic principles of search engine optimization.
To frame the issue of doorway pages it is important to understand why content is so critical to search engine optimization. In order to do this we need to step back and take a look at the search engines themselves:
Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all other search engines want to provide the same thing: A prioritized list of links that point to most relevant web sites satisfying the users search criteria.
Relevance is defined as the