What is a doorway page?
A doorway page is built for the search engine, not the visitor. It targets a query, usually a keyword plus a location or a variation, and exists only to be found and to push the person through to somewhere else: a homepage, a form, an affiliate link. The giveaway is multiplication. One service, forty towns, forty near-identical pages with the town name swapped, all leading to the same contact page.
Google names doorway pages in its spam policies and ran a specific algorithm update against them in 2015. The test it applies is intent: are these pages useful destinations in their own right, or are they intermediate steps that a visitor would rather skip?
Why it matters
Why a doorway page matters
It matters because the line between a doorway and a legitimate landing page is where a lot of real businesses sit. A studio with two offices has a reason for two location pages. A brand serving every zip code in the state does not have a reason for a page per zip code, and building them anyway is the fastest way to turn a site into something Google's spam systems recognize at a glance.
The cost of getting it wrong is not a lower ranking for the doorways; it is a manual action, or an algorithmic devaluation, that can take the whole site with them. The cost of getting it right is more modest: fewer pages, each one earning its place.
In practice
How a doorway page works in practice
- 01
Doorways get built in three ways: a template with substituted keywords, a cluster of pages that all point to the same destination with no reason to exist separately, and pages that redirect or cloak, showing the search engine one thing and the visitor another. Google's systems compare the pages to each other and to the destination, and clusters of near-duplicates with one purpose stand out.
- 02
The legitimate alternative is to build one page per genuine difference. If you serve two cities with different teams, different work and different addresses, those pages can be distinct and useful. If you serve ten cities identically, say so on one page and let that page rank. Where you have inherited doorways, consolidate them with 301 redirects into the page that holds the real content, and let the crawl budget go somewhere useful.
At RIOT
Doorway pages at RIOT
We have pages for the industries we work in: fashion, luxury, sport and beauty. They exist because the work in each is different and the argument we make to each is different, which is the test a doorway fails. Each carries its own films and its own case for why that world needs a creative agency and production studio fluent in it.
Watch out
What people get wrong about doorway pages
Assuming any location page is a doorway. Google's objection is to pages with no distinct value, not to pages about places. A location page with its own address, its own people, its own photographs and its own client work is a landing page. The opposite mistake is thinking a doorway is fine as long as the copy is unique, meaning spun. Rewriting the same paragraph forty ways does not give forty pages a reason to exist, and it reads as exactly what it is.
