Doorway pages are webpages created specifically for high ranking in search engine results for particular keywords / queries. They serve as a direct point of entry for traffic originating from search engines and are not always made for being visited by visitors arriving through the home page. Webmasters are sometimes told to submit “bridge” pages or “doorway” pages to search engines to improve their traffic. Doorway pages are created to do well for particular phrases. They are also known as portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages, and by other names as well.
Unlike doorway domains, doorway pages are not really sanctioned by search engines because generally they really respond to users’ needs and because it is often difficult to differentiate them from “natural” pages.
There are various ways to deliver doorway pages. The low-tech way is to create and submit a page that is targeted toward a particular phrase. Some people take this a step further and create a page for each phrase and for each search engine.
One problem with this is that these pages tend to be very generic. It’s easy for people to copy them, make minor changes, and submit the revised page from their own site in hopes of mimicking any success. Also, the pages may be so similar to each other that they are considered duplicates and automatically excluded by the search engine from its listings.
Some doorway pages are naturally created by faceted browsing functions, automatically created by use of templates and others have to be manually created. When made specifically (which is strictly speaking the “real” doorway page), doorway pages have often a text with high keyword density and on-page SEO is heavily used.
Agent Delivery is to deliver a doorway page that only the search engine sees. Each search engine reports an “agent” name, just as each browser reports a name. The advantage to agent name delivery is that you can send the search engine to a tailored page yet direct users to the actual content you want them to see. This eliminates the entire “bridge” problem altogether. It also has the added benefit of “cloaking” your code from prying eyes.
Some websites may have thousands of doorway pages automatically created from templates. Locations are often used for creating doorway pages and on eCommerce websites doorway pages are often used for covering queries matching product categories.