Search and SEO
What is Doorway pages?
Doorway pages are multiple similar pages created to rank for slight keyword variations, funnelling visitors to the same destination. The classic form is one page per town for a business with no presence in any of them. They are an explicit search engine policy violation.
Also called: gateway pages · bridge pages
How to tell whether yours is one
Ask what the page contains that is true of that place and false of the others. Completed jobs there, named neighbourhoods you cover, pricing that differs, local regulations, photographs of actual work. If the honest answer is "the town name", it is a doorway page.
Why small local sites are the target
The policy exists because the tactic is cheapest and most tempting at small scale. A sole trader generating forty town pages is exactly the profile it was written about, and enforcement does not require a competitor to complain.
What to do instead
- One strong page per service you actually sell
- Coverage stated honestly on a single page
- A location page only where you can write three genuinely specific paragraphs
- Industry pages instead of geography — "websites for landlord compliance companies" targets a buyer with a problem and carries no doorway risk
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Local SEO when customers do not come to your address covers this properly — 3 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.