This March 16th, Google had announced that they are currently working on an update specifically made for ranking adjustments on doorway pages.
Doorway pages are used mainly for spamdexing. This is when a search engine gets spammed by deliberately inserting results for specific phrases that sends visitors to a different page. In a general sense, Doorway pages that redirect users/visitors to another search result without their knowledge and is a form of Cloaking. This can help in ranking a website of course. The problem is, that it makes a website rank for a particular keyword or phrase that is never mentioned on the website itself.
This makes them easy to be confused with “landing pages”. The only difference is, that “landing pages” contain rich information for the user, whereas a doorway page acts more like a ninja trap that tricks visitors to coming into the website by showing irrelevant info.
Doorway pages mainly try to maximise their search footprint by creating pages both externally on the web or internally on their websites. This helps them ranking in multiple pages in search results. These of course, lead back to one (or the same) destination.
So, this all means doorway pages will stop ranking on search results. For companies and website owners that have made doorway pages as part of their campaigns, they will most likely be the first ones that will be hit by the first wave of this new penalty/algorithm update.
Also, Google has included some questions to check if a page can be seen as a doorway page:
Read the official announcement here.
What does this mean? Well, for one, some pages or sites might be able to finally rank higher, since these doorway pages will be dethroned. Also, this makes search engine results cleaner. There are still times when users would want to look for something on the web and find garbage. Even with exact keywords and phrases that ask questions. (and yes, even with all the updates like Hummingbird, Panda and Penguin) This heralds a time where we (hopefully) might live in a world where we can find information on the web faster and easier.
If your strategies never included making doorway pages, well, this will never be a problem for you. It might even help you rank better when the doorway pages get thrown out of their rankings. But if you did make doorway pages before, watch out.
