(dōr´wā) (n.) Also referred to as a doorway page, a jump page, an entry page or a bridge page. A Web page designed specifically for the purpose of gaining high placement in a search engine’s rankings. An SEO technique, the doorway is meant to capture the attention of a search engine’s spider by containing keywords and phrases that the spider will pick up on. Often the doorway page contains hidden text in order to load the page with occurrences of a specific keyword or phrase. Doorways typically are programmed with a fast meta refresh or a redirect that brings the user to the page that the Web site actually wants the user to visit, or the doorway will have a way for the user to manually click through to the next site. Some search engines are wary of doorway pages and penalize sites that use them. For example, read Google’s opinion of doorway pages.
May also be called a gateway page.
Search Engine Watch Features a webmaster's guide to search engines, along with search engine facts, status reports, reviews, tutorials, and related resources.
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