Glossary
Doorway page
A doorway page is a low-value page created mainly to rank for a query and funnel visitors somewhere else, rather than to serve them itself.
Updated 2 Sept 2026
In detail
Doorway pages are usually generated in bulk from a template, with a city, service, product or keyword swapped in and little else that differs. They are a spam policy violation on Google whether they are produced deliberately by a site owner or planted by an attacker after a compromise. The defining trait is not that a page is templated but that it does not stand on its own: visitors arriving from search must click through to get any real answer.
Why it matters
Bulk near-duplicate pages dilute crawl budget, compete with the pages a site actually wants ranked, and put the whole domain at risk of a manual action for scaled content abuse. For a compromised site, mass-generated doorways are also the fastest way to accumulate thousands of indexed URLs that then have to be removed one by one.
Examples
- Hundreds of '<service> in <city>' URLs whose only difference is the city name in the heading and title.
- Attacker-generated keyword pages under /wp-content/uploads/ that redirect to a single affiliate offer.
- Multiple near-identical landing pages targeting synonyms of one query, all pointing to the same contact form.