Doorway Sites - (A subset of Link Building)

Old timers will remember this phrase with very negative

connotations. Around the year 2000, a “Doorway Site” meant

a “fake” site that looked just like the site you were going to,

which existed just to fool the Search Engines into thinking

that they are multiple sites with different keywords, yet humans wouldn’t know

that they were separate at all. (They could cover more keywords that way.)

That trick is so obvious to every Search Engine now that no one even attempts it

anymore. They’d get their IP address banned for sure.

Nowadays, a lot of Internet Marketers are reviving the phrase to mean a slightly

different, much more SE-friendly strategy of link building.

These new ‘Doorway Sites’ are usually just blogs or informational websites s uch

as an “AdSense Farm” site. However, its main purpose, whether it displays Ads

on it or not, is just to exist as an on-topic link to the owner’s primary website!

The fact is that websites are so cheap and easy to spit out these days, even with

well placed keywords and content, that it’s actually worth the time of a dedicated

webmaster trying to build lots of relevant, one-way links to make these websites

just for the linking value alone.

Obviously this is a long-term strategy that won’t be getting you any clicks or even

rank improvement this week. To do it right you’ll need to make this doorway site

with well-placed keywords, semi-fresh content, and submit it to all the link

directories before linking it to your primary website.

Still, if you’re in it for the long-haul, imagine what 50 or more of these pointing to

one site will do for it’s ranking, all targeting a different primary keyword on topic.

One serious concern is that Googlebot checks IP addresses. A few of these

websites sharing the same IP address at your server host is fine… But there is

an upper limit and Google isn’t telling us exactly what that limit is.

If you get serious about this technique, you may find yourself spending a lot of

money on hosting in order to purchase IP addresses on separate “class C

blocks,” which will fool any Search Engine into thinking that the separate sites

aren’t owned by the same person.

Another approach is to make your websites in lots of different free blogging or

free website platforms, like Blogger, Wordpress, Freewebs, etc… Naturally this is

much more time consuming because of the variation.

Keeping it a small operation, perhaps 10-50 or so sites pointing to one primary

website shouldn’t be a real concern at any rate. Just a lot of work.