Member Avatar for Ravi Rajput

What is doorway page? are they come under black hat SEO?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Peter Harvy

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Short clarification and practical steps built on the thread: contributors such as , , and touched on quality and risk. Below are concrete patterns to watch for, ways to confirm whether a site has doorway-style pages, and safe remediation and prevention steps that go beyond the brief answers already posted.

Common doorway patterns to inspect

  • Large sets of pages that differ only by a city, keyword or URL parameter but share nearly identical body text and navigation.
  • Pages that immediately redirect users into a single funnel after landing.
  • Thin, templated pages created en masse by CMS/plugins to target many keyword permutations.
  • Pages with keyword-stuffed titles/meta descriptions and little unique content.

How to confirm a problem

  • Crawl the site (Screaming Frog, site: queries) and sort for near-duplicate titles, meta descriptions, and low word-count pages.
  • Use analytics to find pages with impressions but very low clicks, or high bounce/zero-time sessions—common signs of low-value landing pages.
  • Check Search Console for Manual Actions or sudden drops in indexed pages and organic traffic.

Remediation and recovery (order matters)

  • Decide: merge similar pages into one useful resource, or delete low-value pages.
  • Implement technical fixes: 301 redirects for pages being removed, rel="canonical" where appropriate, or return 410 for permanently removed pages.
  • Improve retained pages with unique, user-focused content (not just keyword swaps) and clear navigation to real resources.
  • After fixes, use Search Console’s Manual Actions (if present) to submit a review request; if no manual action exists, continue monitoring traffic/indexing.

Prevention and safer alternatives

  • For legitimate regional or filtered pages, use canonicalization, hreflang for language/region targeting, and server-side parameter handling rather than thousands of near-duplicate pages.
  • Avoid automated page generation that only swaps keywords; focus on solving user intent for each page.

This expands on points raised earlier in the thread and focuses on detection, stepwise fixes, and long-term alternatives that preserve search visibility without risking manual or algorithmic penalties.

Recommended Answers

All 4 Replies

Member Avatar for Manish02

Doorway page is fake page that user will never see. It is for search engine spiders. They are come under black hat SEO.

Member Avatar for seomongo

Doorway pages are against the Google guidelines and can still work for results but lead to a de-indexing of the site if caught, in which case you would have to fill out a Reinclusion request with G.

Member Avatar for creditcards

Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase.
Since both are intended to deceive search engines, they are termed as black-hat.

Member Avatar for Peter Harvy

This is purely black hat technique, which works against the search engine guidlines...so if we follow this technique we can't get results to your website or blog..so better to avoid this kind of fraud techniques to getout from spam thing by Google..

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