Are Landing Pages the New Doorway Pages?

Mary Bowling | 19 September 2006 |

Doorway Pages

The term “doorway pages” has very negative black hat connotations. These types of pages were used in various ways in the past to try to game the search engines. This was often done by registering many, many domains and putting a single, usually over-optimized or spammy, page up on each site and then having all those pages forward to the website you were really trying to promote.

Another tactic was to create a doorway page to draw people to a website which was about something entirely different than the true theme of the website. For instance, a doorway page was created and optimized for “bath toys” and when someone arrived at the page, they were immediately forwarded or redirected to a site about “sex toys” instead. Doorway pages worked for a while, but they are now dead.

Landing Pages

Landing pages may sound similar to doorway pages, but are something very different.

A landing page is used to “land” a visitor on the exact page that suits their search. For instance, if you are bidding in Google AdWords on the term “Jackson Hole spa”, you would develop a specific page about your Jackson Hole hotel’s spa as the destination URL for that ad. When the ad is clicked on, the searcher will land on your page all about a Jackson Hole spa. The search engine returns a very relevant result, the visitor gets exactly what they searched for and you get a very qualified visitor. Everyone wins!

The Benefit of Good Landing Pages

The search engines, especially Google, are committed to delivering relevance, whether the search result is a paid ad or an organic listing. This is why Google AdWords has recently clamped down on its advertisers. People who present pages that are not very relevant to the search being made are now being penalized by having to pay higher prices for clicks to those pages, while others are being rewarded for delivering searchers to very relevant pages. For instance, someone who is bidding on “Colorado cabin rental” and delivering a page about log cabin kits pays more than someone whose page is about cabins for rent in Colorado. Someone who delivers a page of nothing but ads about log cabin kits pays even more, and someone who delivers a page full of ads about cell phones pays more, still.

This same scenario holds true with organic listings, only the cost and reward manifests itself in the search engine results, instead of in dollars and cents. A well-optimized page about a Denver spa should rank highly in the SERPs for that term. If the page is optimized for Denver spa, but the content on the page does not support it, it should theoretically not rank well for that search. Therefore, it is best to optimize pages for terms that the page is really about. When you do, they become good landing pages for those terms and the search engine, the searcher and you all benefit.

Mary Bowling - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.