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Dompros
Posts: 161
Joined: 2/14/2002
From: CA USA
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Do we need doorway pages? - 2/19/2002 17:19:26
It kinda bugs me when I have to open more than 1 page to get to what I'm there for!
What are doorway pages for?
I don't even like movie intros, I just want to go into the site, do my business and leave...
If we do need doorways... What do I do? Just make a page, and link it to the index page.
I don't get the point!
Regards... Robert
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abbeyvet
Posts: 5095
From: Kilkenny Ireland
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RE: Do we need doorway pages? - 2/19/2002 17:25:02
I think you mean a splash page - one with nothing much on it except an image or Flash or something and (in the better instances) a skip inro or enter link.
No, you don;t need them, more often than not they are an annoyance.
A doorway page is a different thing - it is a content rich page that leads into your site and being content rich is loved by search engines. They are usually also highly optimised for search engines in other ways. Some sites create dozens of them all of which are basically just a lead in to the main site.
Katherine
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www.inkkdesign.com
"Dogs have owners, cats have staff"
Meeeooow!
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Dompros
Posts: 161
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From: CA USA
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RE: Do we need doorway pages? - 2/19/2002 17:50:38
Hi, Katherine
Yea, that's what I meant... A doorway page.
I just mentioned splash pages cause I don't like em!
So,an index page isn't content rich but a doorway page is?
Does anyone ever read a doorway page besides the search engine crawlers?
I mean do humans read them?
How does one name (URL) a doorway page?
How is a doorway page submitted to the search engines?
Can a template be made for doorway pages?
Does one just gather up content from the website and paste it into a doorway page?
Signed, Ignorant... Robert
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abbeyvet
Posts: 5095
From: Kilkenny Ireland
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RE: Do we need doorway pages? - 2/19/2002 18:03:51
Creating dorrway pages is a fairly tricky thing to do. They can be ones that people actually see but are sort of cul de sacs, that is once clicked off they are not returnable to from the site.
They need to be created very carefully, search engines owners are not universally in favour f them and doing them poorly can result in a site being dropped from a search engine altogether, kind of the opposite to the intention.
Basically different pages are created for each search engine, or each keyword or in some cases for each search engeine FOR each keyword. They need to take into account how the search and rating logorithm for that site weighs the various things on a page like keyword weight, frequency, density and prominence. It requires a pretty thorough knowledge of how each SE works and there is always a thin line between sucess and being copped for spam.
Software like Web Position Gold create them semi automatically. There is reams and reams of stuff about them on all the search engine info sites, there advantages and disadvantages and the issues surrounding their use are the subject of a lot of debate.
Try www.searchenginewatch.com - you will find some stuff there.
Katherine
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www.inkkdesign.com
"Dogs have owners, cats have staff"
Meeeooow!
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puiwaihin
Posts: 1378
From: Taiwan
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RE: Do we need doorway pages? - 2/19/2002 18:06:15
What these doorway pages do is include a bunch of text that match what's included in the meta-tag key word description.
By mentioning each key word a few times in the body of the text, the page is ranked higher by many search engines' relevancy algorithms.
This is a good tactic if your index page is a frames page, if you have relevant information not reflected in the first few levels of navigation, and if you organize the content into an introduction.
I use one because my site was originally created in frames. When I moved my setup to include pages I kept the doorway page because it served to offer a choice between English and Chinese navigation.
But if the doorway is just a blatant grab for higher ratings, with little or no relevancy to the rest of your site, some search engines will penalize you-- especially human reviewed ones.
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Who put the self-destruct button THERE?!
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Dompros
Posts: 161
Joined: 2/14/2002
From: CA USA
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RE: Do we need doorway pages? - 2/19/2002 18:39:38
Holy Underwear!
I'm going to have to meditate on this!
I went to a site on the net that said..."free doorway pages"
One of their utilities pumped them out, the ones that I saw, were nothing as you all have discribed!
Just a little page with a few discriptive words and the site name...
There is one thing that I do know about doorway pages, it's this,
If I try hard enough, I can foul up anything!
Regards, and thanks for your very interesting lessons! This is better than any classroom I've been in!
Robert
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PBailey
Posts: 907
From: San Antonio, Texas USA
Status: offline
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RE: Do we need doorway pages? - 2/19/2002 20:11:41
Puiwaihin,
Thanks for clearing that up for me. Portal probably is a better word or what I do with these pages.
I didn't even know I could do a page where text didn't show up.
So much to learn!
Thanks,
Paula
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Dompros
Posts: 161
Joined: 2/14/2002
From: CA USA
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RE: Do we need doorway pages? - 2/19/2002 20:50:48
OK...
So the next step for me, would be,
How would the code be written in order to hide the text content from visitors?
Where would I learn that trick?
Robert...
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DarlingBri
Posts: 3123
From: Left of Centre, Cork, Ireland
Status: offline
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RE: Do we need doorway pages? - 2/19/2002 22:38:17
Its a bad method that will get you chucked off a search engine faster than you can say "Bob's your uncle and Fanny's your aunt."
Make a page that's, say, white. Chuck some content on it with a link, like "Welcome to our site."
And the underneath that, spam the hell out of your keywords, and turn them white.[/]
widgets,widgets,widgets,widgets,big widgets,big widgets, etc etc etc.
--Bri
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#!usr/bin/girl
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Dompros
Posts: 161
Joined: 2/14/2002
From: CA USA
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RE: Do we need doorway pages? - 2/20/2002 1:35:32
Wholly socks, Bri!
I thought that's what the porn sites used to do, til they wised up to 'em?
Signed, Wondering, Robert
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Reflect
Posts: 4769
From: USA
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RE: Do we need doorway pages? - 2/20/2002 7:52:27
Hi,
Bri hit it right. The text on page being the same color will get you tossed faster than ****.
I take a different approach. I, somewhere down around my third level of pages, make content on just the keyword/keyword phrase that I want to target. I just made around 10 pages in this fashion last weekend. I make sure it works into the third tier navigation as on theme content and viewable. I then on my index page throw a link to the page that links all of these pages together. This way my highest pagerank page is pointing to these directly. In Google's mind this gives the sub page a pagerank boost just becuase of the link. Which then makes the sub page crawl up in the ranking even more.
This is not the traditional doorway page but it works great for me.
Brian
Work hard, play fair, stay sane
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PBailey
Posts: 907
From: San Antonio, Texas USA
Status: offline
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RE: Do we need doorway pages? - 2/20/2002 8:06:35
This is interesting. Now for the dumb question.
If the text is white and the page is white but the text is sitting in a cell with a different colored background which counts?
Paula
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abbeyvet
Posts: 5095
From: Kilkenny Ireland
Status: offline
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RE: Do we need doorway pages? - 2/20/2002 10:43:07
If the text is sitting on a color that renders it visible to anyone looking at the page with a standard browser - no problem.
This is my understanding of what happens.
When a search engine spider arrives at your site it reads the content of various sections of your page and various elements within the page. For example the metatags, keywords, body text,links etc etc. It also can calculate the number of incoming links. Then a number of calculations are performed on this data to extract information like keywords, keyphrases, keyword density and so on.
Each search engine then has a different calculation - the logarithm - which it perfotms on that data to decide how the site will be indexed. This varies from SE to SE quite a bit but most of the calculations are known so that SE experts know exactly what cuases a given page to rank well in a given search engine.
Doorway pages are, in the strict definition of the term, pages that are specificically optimized for a given keyword or phrase and a given search engine logarithm.
Here is the interesting bit though. While spidering of sites is automated there is also a built in mechanism for reporting 'suspicious' pages to real humans. These could be pages where the text and background colors look too close for the text to be readable. Or ones where there is over repetition of keywords. Or, and this one is interesting, ones which are just too perfectly in conformity with the particular SE logarithm. The last are considered suspicious because the chance of someone genuinely writing about a topic actually hitting on the SE ideal keyword density, frequency, prominience and fitting the SE logarithm perfectly or near perfectly is about as good as the monkey at the piano actually playing a Mozart sonata.
Anyway if a human takes a look at one of these reported pages and decides it is spam the SE logarithm is out the window - unless the page is of genuine use not just the page but the entire site is dropped in the ranking or even dumped from the index entirely.
So, the trick is to get it right - but not too right.
There are two main ways of creating doorway page - humans writing them and software writing them. The latter try to get them perfect but not so perfect that they are suspicious, a fine line. The former are few and far between and being humna have an inbuilt ability not to be too perfect anyway but also a dnagerous propensity in many cases to just make a mess of it altogether.
The internet is awash with people offering to create doorway pages for you for various amounts of your hard earned cash. Many promise the sun moon and stars and while a few are decent upstanding citizens, sad to say a very great number fall into the category of shysters.
It pays to take a look at all this this from the SE point of view. What they are attempting to do is ensure that when a user searches for something the most relevant results are returned. A simple thing to aim at but very difficulat to acheive. especially when the world and his mother are trying to 'trick' their way to the top.
At the end of the day if your site has genuinely useful content, is presented with good simple optimisation done (like relevant titles, keywords and descriptions), if specific pages are used for specific topics so that they have a sort of built in relevancy (much like Brian has done) it will do ok.
I realy believe that if those people who become obsessed with SE placement, spending hours and days and often a hell of a lot of money spent half that effort on improving their content they would be performing just fine in the SEs anyway. Unless their content is so inherently poor that the only hope of ranking is trickery. And, sad to say, my perception is also that this is the case in many of the instances where extensive use of doorway pages is employed.
Katherine
++++++++++++++++++++++++
www.inkkdesign.com
"Dogs have owners, cats have staff"
Meeeooow!
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PBailey
Posts: 907
From: San Antonio, Texas USA
Status: offline
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RE: Do we need doorway pages? - 2/20/2002 17:49:47
Katherine,
Thanks for the great explanation.
I agree with your last comments. Good site, good content, done right works best. When I look at a site I can't help it, my marketing background kicks in. Lots of really bad sites out there. Lots of sites that look pretty and say nothing and are completely devoid of marketing concept.
Thanks again,
Paula
Just a note on the forum. When I did active topics this one didn't come up. I had to go check the forum itself to see if there had been an answer. Anyone else having this problem?
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Bill Seper
Posts: 416
From: USA
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RE: Do we need doorway pages? - 2/21/2002 22:03:36
FYI,
When I think of doorway pages the first thing that usually pops into my head are book and drug sites. Places like barnes and nobles encourage and give you the tools (including all the script) for making your own little barnes and nobels storefront. When someone clicks on an item it takes them to the real barnesandnoble.com site. Yours can look exactly like a page from theirs as long as you're in their affiliate program.
A lot of on-line drug companies provide you (if you're in an affiliate program with them) with doorway pages that are duplicates of their storefronts also. Beware of drug companies BTW; they absolutely will NOT pay you!
***********
Moo Baby!
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Dompros
Posts: 161
Joined: 2/14/2002
From: CA USA
Status: offline
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RE: Do we need doorway pages? - 2/21/2002 22:56:35
Bill,
Sounds like you've been there done that!
After reading all of the interesting posts here, I still can't make up my mind about gettting involved with doorway pages or not!
Robert
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