Lesson #23 Gateway Pages: Tips to Boost Your Own Relevance and Link Popularity!
Written By Cyndalie

We all know that a doorway page, loosely described, is any page specifically optimized for search engine ranking that can expand on the number of keywords and phrases driving traffic to your site beyond your primary web site pages. By cross linking these pages to the most relevant pages within your site, you can help to increase the overall relevance for the primary keywords you are targeting, as well as the number of keywords you are ranking for. The basis for any good keyword ranking stands in solid HTML optimization practices, giving the engines what they want, and keyword-friendly content with links that drive visitors to where they want to be within your site.

In previous lessons, we have talked about how the use of promotional domain names, or "dummy domains", can help to increase the amount of active optimized pages in the search engines, either through sub-domains or additional domains. The general rule of thumb with these types of promotional sites is to create a small sub-site around the area of content you want to focus for ranking on, and to create no more than 30 pages per domain name (residing on unique IP addresses). Remember not to submit more than 2 NEW pages per domain per day. A stream of new pages into the engines is much more well received than a flood.

Now I'd like to talk about the purpose and uses of gateway, or hallway pages. First thing first, a gateway page is not meant for high ranking in the search engines. It is ideally designed to create a bridge between your pages and domains. In fact, the ideal gateway page is your site map, where you can provide a detailed list of a linked title to each page (keyword friendly, of course) with a non-linked description, on each domain you have. By going either further you can also include listings for your promotional domains and primary pages as well - a sitemap of sitemaps.

Think of your optimized search engine property as a pyramid, building up in keyword relevance from the base to the top, where your home page resides. Gateway pages are bridges across each layer, tying everything together for a greater purpose, and not mean to be spammy or spider traps in any way. In fact, although you want all pages of each domain spidered, you do not want to create a spider trap. A trickle down effect must occur because all in truth, you cannot update all of your pages on a regular basis. Sometimes a spider likes a page that remains consistent, or non changed over a period of time. However if you let a page go without updating it for too long (2-3 years), or even without simply re-uploading it to tell the server the page is a new version, the search engine may begin to simply ignore those pages and replace them out of high rankings with newer pages.

We all know that Google likes fresh content rich pages. So once a month, if you don't have time to actually make changes to all your pages, just re-upload existing pages and refresh the date of the page on the server. Google will know it's an updated version of an indexed page, but not exactly what is new until it re-indexes the page. This tip is not mean to be abused, it is simply for those webmasters who have worked hard to create search engine friendly pages but don't have the time to update them all every month. And no, date stamps or dynamic content feeds won't necessarily work. They work when it's a person viewing the page, not necessarily a spider. It is possible however, for a spider to crawl a feed link to detect the content that would have appeared in the page, especially PHP, Cold Fusion, and ASP. It is important to remember that you do not need to resubmit pages that are currently indexed.

Two examples of gateway pages are the SiteMap Version and the Directory Version. A tip I picked up from JK Bowman's Spider-Food.net (great guy!) is that you can create the link to each page that does "not go directly to the URL. What you go to is a named anchor (that is also keyword phrase intense). The reason we did this is because search engines often consider links to named anchors more relevant" (Source). How's that for some great advice!

I've done research on Gateway/Hallway pages and found them 90% the time confused with doorway pages. To keep our terminology straight here in Traffic Lounge, Gateway pages are designed to create a descriptive text link index of your pages on any level of domain or across domains. A Gateway page tie your pages together, yet does not bind the spider, which in turn creates a level of relevancy that supports your home page or primary traffic target of pages.

By creating of sub-index of all your optimized search engine property, you will find it not only easier to manage and update when adding new pages, you may find that each of your promotional domains increases in link popularity and relevance through your own efforts! If you own more than 3 domains, you can help increase your own primary site's Page Rank in Google. It's possible, try it, but again do not abuse or over-use any one tactic in search engine marketing.