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 such 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.