The ever-changing SEO field requires you to stay compliant with the evolving search engine guidelines so as to boost the visibility of your website.
One technique, which was used before but is now discouraged and even penalized, is the creation of doorway pages. In 2025, knowing about doorway pages and understanding why they are detrimental to your SEO efforts is crucial. Alongside this, learning how to identify and remove them from your website has become quite important nowadays.
In this in-depth guide, you will learn about doorway pages thoroughly. So, let’s begin!
What is a Doorway Page?
A doorway page is a low-quality webpage which is made specifically to get search engine traffic for certain keywords and even search queries. It is not like your website’s regular pages, which provide valuable and relevant content to the users.
Instead, doorway pages are quite thin and contain content that is largely unoriginal. Its main purpose is to act as a gateway which funnels visitors to another page on the existing website or even a distinct website.
Types of Doorway Pages
Doorway pages have different forms, and they have the same characteristic of being designed mainly for search engines instead of the users.
One common type includes creating many pages that target slightly different geographical areas and even keyword variations. It holds true even if the actual service or product is offered across all locations.
Another type of doorway page includes generating many pages which target highly specific long-tail keywords with repetitive content that doesn’t have any depth.
These pages may utilize different variations in phrasing, but provide little to no major difference in the information that is provided.
Did You Know?
Doorway pages are more than often orphan pages. So, knowing how to find and fix orphan pages holds a lot of importance.
What is the Difference Between a Doorway Page and a Landing Page?
Doorway pages and landing pages are designed to be the points through which visitors enter a website. However, their purpose, content, and SEO impact are quite different. A properly optimized landing page is one of the most important assets which are focused on a particular marketing campaign or conversion goal. It provides the right type of content, which is related directly to the offer or keyword that has brought the user there in the first place.
On the other hand, a doorway page gives priority to the search engine rankings instead of the user experience. The content of these pages is quite thin, generic, and duplicated across different pages that are quite similar. The main goal of a doorway page is to get search engine traffic and then quickly redirect or funnel users to another page without providing the information they were looking for.
Doorway Pages Don’t Work for SEO
You need to understand that in 2025, doorway pages are not at all effective when it comes to SEO. As a matter of fact, they can be quite detrimental and even lead to serious penalties.
The search engine algorithms, especially those of Google’s have become really quick in identifying and even penalizing the websites which use tactics such as those of doorway pages.
These algorithms give priority to the user experience and aim to deliver high-quality results to the searchers. Doorway pages are in direct contrast to this concept, as the main purpose of these pages is to funnel traffic instead of providing immense value.
How to Find Doorway Pages on Your Site?
Finding out the doorway pages on your website is one of the most important steps in rectifying any SEO issues they might be causing. That’s why having a manual audit of your website’s structure and content becomes crucial. For this purpose, you should choose the right SEO audit services for your needs.
You can look for pages that target highly specific long-tail keywords and even the geographical variations of keywords. It holds even more true if these pages have minimal unique content.
You should pay close attention to pages that act as redirects to other important pages. Analyzing the content of these suspected pages in terms of repetitive content and value can help you find out whether it’s a doorway page or not.
How to Remove Doorway Pages Quickly and Easily?
Once you’ve found out the doorway pages on your website, it’s important to remove them promptly to avoid any potential SEO penalties. The best approach will be to delete the doorway pages entirely.
Before doing so, you need to assess whether any valuable content is present on these pages or not. If that’s the case, check whether it can be merged or incorporated into the user-friendly pages of your website.
In case the targeted keywords are still relevant to your website, you can even create high-quality and thorough content which addresses the user’s search intent.
Let’s say that the doorway pages are redirecting to other unrelated pages. In that case, you should ensure that those redirects are removed and the target pages are properly optimized for the relevant keywords.
Pro Tip: With the help of the right type of technical SEO services, you will be able to outsource the process of identifying and removing doorway pages from your website.
Conclusion
Doorway pages are quite risky and have become an outdated SEO strategy which has the potential to harm your website’s performance. Once upon a time, they were used to try and game the search engine algorithms, but the search engines have become quite smart nowadays.
In fact, the search engines are designed to give priority to the users’ experience, along with providing high-quality and relevant content. Creating doorway pages not just violates these core principles but can also harm your website significantly.
Doorway pages can expose your website to stringent penalties, lower your search engine rankings and even lead to de-indexing of your website. So, you should avoid creating doorway pages at all costs.
FAQs
Q. Will my website be penalized if I have old doorway pages on my site?
Yes, the presence of doorway pages on your website, even if they are old, can potentially lead to several penalties. So, it’s important to remove all such doorway pages from your website.
Q. Can I just noindex doorway pages?
Utilizing the “noindex” meta tag can prevent search engines from indexing a page, but it will not solve the underlying issue of thin or low-quality website content. So, deleting these doorway pages is the only solution.
Q. How long does it take for search engine penalties related to doorway pages to be lifted?
The time it takes for penalties to be lifted depends on the severity and duration of the doorway page issues. So, you need to be patient and regularly create high-quality content.
