What is a Gateway Page?
A gateway page is a page thats sole purpose is to rank well for a particular key term or search query. This is also known as a doorway page, and is known as a black hat SEO tactic (this means that it violates Google’s guidelines). The page itself offers no real value to the user, as the on-page content is designed to boost visibility and rankings in the SERPs and don’t offer answers to the specific search query. The page acts as a redirect to other internal pages, hence the name gateway. These pages work in a few different ways:
- Using Javascript redirects or Meta refreshing to forward users onto a different page. This works for users but doesn’t do this for crawlers from search engines.
- They implement a black hat SEO tactic known as cloaking to show a particular page to search engines for the sole purpose of ranking but show a completely different page to users.
- Creating content-rich gateway pages that seem useful on the service, but provide CTAs or calls to action that link to the destination page.
Since 2015, Google has cracked down on gateway pages thats sole purpose is to manipulate rankings in the SERPs and disregard the user’s search experience. It’s highly likely that if you use these tactics, that you could get a manual action taken against your site (penalty) for using cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Are gateway pages useful for SEO?
Let’s make it clear, we do not recommend or condone the use of gateway pages or any black hat SEO tactic for that matter. But it’s important to understand what you can and can’t do in SEO.
So how do we know if a page on our site may be considered as a gateway page? let’s look into this further….
You should ask yourself the following:
- Are the pages designed and optimised for search engines to funnel visitors to a relevant portion of your site while disregarding user experience?
- Are the pages intended to rank for generic terms – even if their content is highly specific?
- Do the pages use duplicate or near-duplicate useful content (locations, products etc) that already exist on your site to capture more search traffic?
- Are these pages made solely to draw affiliate traffic?
- Are these pages very difficult (or impossible) to navigate to from other pages on your website?
What should you do instead of using gateway pages?
Using gateway pages goes against Google’s guidelines, we’ve established this. But there are legitimate, white-hat SEO techniques you can use.
Create helpful, Reliable, People-first Content
It’s important to remember when you create a page, what its purpose will be, and what value are you offering to your users. How does it answer their search query?
No page you create will rank for a single keyword, in fact, many well-performing web pages rank for thousands of key terms. But don’t worry about that right now, focus on your topic, try and cover the topic in its entirety and offer questions that may be asked after reading your content, this way your users will leave your page satisfied with what they have read. Google says to create helpful, reliable, people-first content, so keep that in mind when you’re creating content.
Incorporate long-tail keywords into your Strategy
Long-tail keywords typically have a much lower ranking difficulty due to lower competition in the SERPs. Many gateway pages use these tactics to help rank for more key terms and drive more traffic to the page but don’t offer any value to users that land there.
Long tail keywords are an important part of any SEO campaign and should be added to your content planner. You can target these key terms through white-hat SEO practices such as blog or article writing, where you can really focus on a particular topic.
Avoid Unnecessary Redirects
Forced redirects such as Meta refresh and JavaScript redirects can send the wrong kind of message to search engines and users. They are often noticed and may eventually cause your site to get manual actions taken against it. Try to avoid any unnecessary redirects if possible, use Google’s free Search Console tools to help check your website for any technical issues that may arise from 301s or 404s or canonicalisation tags. This will also help prevent any crawling or indexing issues.
