Doorway pages

Long definition

Google's doorways spam policy defines them as "sites or pages created to rank for similar search queries" where each doorway "funnels visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site". The May 2015 doorway update was a discrete classifier strengthening that demoted many of the most aggressive doorway clusters and signaled the policy was being enforced harder.

The questions Google's guidance asks to identify doorways:

• Is the purpose to rank for queries rather than to serve users?
• Are there multiple similar pages targeting close variants ("plumber Madrid", "plumber Barcelona", "plumber Valencia") with little content unique to each?
• Does each page funnel to one destination, with no value standing alone?
• Are the pages on multiple domains or subdomains targeting the same query space?

The classic example is a real-estate site with 5,000 city pages, each with the same template, the same paragraph of generic copy with the city name swapped in, and a contact form leading to one head office. Each page ranks for "real estate [city]"; none of them give the user information they couldn't get from the homepage.

The legitimate counterpart is the local landing page with genuine local content — actual addresses, local agents, neighborhood-specific photography, listings filtered to that city. The structural shape can look similar to a doorway cluster, which is why Google evaluates intent and uniqueness, not just the URL pattern.

Doorway penalties have historically been algorithmic plus manual action. Recovery is mechanical: consolidate the doorway cluster into fewer pages with genuine local content, or remove and 410 the thin variants. Watered-down templates with tiny local tweaks rarely recover — Google's classifier looks at substance, not paragraph order.

Common misconceptions

• "Any city-by-city landing page is a doorway." Not if each page has substantive local content — real local agents, addresses, listings, photos. The policy targets templated emptiness, not local SEO done well.
• "This is an old policy that doesn't matter anymore." The doorways policy is referenced in current spam policies and continues to be enforced. The 2015 update was a tightening, not a one-off — the classifier runs on every crawl.
• "Adding a unique paragraph per city makes it not a doorway." Probably not. Google's evaluation is whether the page provides standalone value, not whether it has 50 unique words. Pages that exist only to funnel users one click further still match the pattern.
• "Doorway and gateway are different things." They're synonyms in SEO usage. "Gateway page" is older terminology; "doorway page" is what Google's policy calls it.