Doorway
A doorway page is built around a specific search query purely to rank for it, not to actually answer it — it forwards the visitor onward instead. Search engines explicitly ban this tactic in their guidelines, and doorway pages that get caught usually lose rankings or get banned outright.
How a doorway page works
The page is stuffed with keywords for one query and just enough thin content to pass basic indexing, while its real job is a redirect or click-through further down the chain. Because it breaks search engine rules, this kind of page tends to have a short lifespan and needs a steady supply of fresh domains to replace the ones that get caught.
Doorway pages in PWA arbitrage
Some buyers use doorway pages as an extra channel to capture search traffic before redirecting into a PWA funnel, separate from paid impression buying. Since a doorway shows search crawlers and reviewers something different from what a real visitor sees, splitting those two scenarios cleanly matters — APEX's built-in cloaking and antibot handle exactly that decision, showing the bait page to one audience and the real PWA funnel to the other.
FAQ
- Are doorway pages against the rules, or just risky?
- They're a direct violation of search engine guidelines, and a caught page or entire domain can get demoted in rankings or banned outright. Treat doorway traffic as a disposable, short-lived asset, not a long-term one.
- How is a doorway page different from a regular landing page?
- A landing page is built to convert a real visitor and optimized for their experience, while a doorway page is built for a search algorithm first, not a person. A doorway isn't trying to hold or persuade the visitor — just pass them along.
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