The easy solution for Doorway pages

Doorway pages, info pages or hallway pages are different names for pages made for Search engines. In Google Quality Guidelines Google advices us to:
• Make pages for users, not for search engines.
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings
• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines

The problem with Doorway pages is not the pages themselves, or the content. But the fact that they are only accessible through a search engine search or links that is almost invisible for the ordinary user. This leads Google to the conclusion that users that visits the website by a link to the homepage sees fewer pages than Googles spider does. The hidden pages is made for showing up with high ranking in the search engines result pages and has only one-way links to the homepage or the websites ordinary pages.

What Google (and the other search engines) want is that all pages (or information) is equally visible both for the ordinary user and for the search engines spiders.

So our simple advice is to make the Doorway pages visible from the home page. Either through the main menu or trough a visible link with a meaningful anchor text. (Why not call them info-pages if that is what they are).

Visibility is not always easy to define. These two examples below is visibility defined as “hidden” by Google. And these solutions caused penalty from Google.

The first one is the old Bolia case where the links was hidden behind the grey vertical text on the right side. In the second example the links was hidden behind the tree-structure (sitemap) symbol in the bottom left area: