Creating Hallway Pages

Once you have created the doorway pages for your site, how do you go about installing them in your site? Should you just upload the doorway pages to your server and then submit those pages to the search engines? You can do that, but you may get a higher ranking if you allow the search engines to spider your doorway pages by following links to them, rather than by submitting them manually. Furthermore, the search engines also take a rather dim view of pages which only contain outgoing links to other pages but do not contain any incoming links from other pages. The search engines will often recognize these pages as doorway pages and may penalize such pages.

The solution is to create hallway pages. Hallway pages are pages which contain links to different doorway pages. What you should do is to create a hallway page for each search engine. The hallway page for a particular search engine would contain links to the doorway pages for that search engine.

Suppose that you are targeting the Infoseek search engine and that you have created doorway pages for the following six keywords:

tourism in Australia
travel to Australia
travelling in Australia
travel agencies in Australia
travelling agencies in Australia
Australian travel agencies

Step 1: Firstly, lets see how you should name the different doorway pages. For optimum results, the file names for the doorway pages should contain the keyword that you are targeting with the individual words of the keyword being separated by hyphens. Furthermore, there should be some way by which you can identify which search engine you have created that page for. Hence, for Infoseek, you can use the suffix "in" after each doorway page. Hence, the six pages for Infoseek would be named as:

tourism-in-australia-in.html
travel-to-australia-in.html
travelling-in-australia-in.html
travel-agencies-in-australia-in.html
travelling-agencies-in-australia-in.html
australian-travel-agencies-in.html

Step 2: Now create a new HTML file and name it something like infoseek.html. Add links to the six doorway pages that you have just created. For optimum results, the text which you use to link to a doorway page should contain the keyword for that doorway page. Hence, the text that you use to link to the file tourism-in-australia-in.html should be "Tourism in Australia". Again, the text that you should use to link to the file travel-to-Australia-in.html should be "Travel to Australia". In this way, add links to each of the six doorway pages.

Step 3: You may be tempted to just add the links to the doorway pages and leave it at that. However, some of the search engines are now detecting pages which only contains links to other pages and are penalizing such pages as well as the pages which they are linked to. They may also penalize the entire site.

To prevent this, you should add two or three sentences after each link, describing, in brief, the page that you are linking to. This will ensure that the search engines do not penalize such hallway pages.

Step 4: Once you have finished creating the hallway page, it is important to remember that in order to get top rankings, each of the doorway pages that you create should be linked, directly or indirectly, to the home page of your site. Hence, you should add a link to the hallway page from your home page. This would ensure that the home page of your site is linked (indirectly in this case) to the different doorway pages.

Now, you dont want people who are seeing the home page to actually follow this link to the hallway page - you only want the search engines to follow this link. However, you cant create links with hidden text (i.e. text with the same color as the background color) in your page since the search engines will almost certainly penalize or even ban your site for doing this.

What you should do is to create a small image which has the same background color as the home page. Then, add this image to the end of the home page and have it link to the hallway page. Furthermore, you should explicitly set the border of the image to 0 (add border = "0" to the img tag of the image). Otherwise, when you get the image to link to the hallway page, a border may be visible. In case you dont want to create your own image, I have created a sample image for you with a white background - you can get it here.

Once you have created the hallway page for one search engine, simply repeat steps 1 to 4 to create the hallway page for another search engine which would contain links to the doorway pages for that search engine. Then, add another instance of the image to the home page and have it link to the new hallway page. Repeat this process for each search engine that you are targeting.

Once you have finished creating the hallway pages for all the search engines, simply go and submit the hallway page that you have created for a search engine to that search engine. Make sure that you do not use any automatic submission tool when you are submitting the pages. You should only submit the pages manually. If you want, you can use our free submission tool. It allows you to submit your site manually to all the major search engines without going to the "Add URL" pages of these search engines.

Wrapping things up:

An important point to note here is that when you submit a page to Infoseek, it doesnt accept the page as such - it will only accept the home page of the domain. Hence, if you submit http://www.mysite.com/infoseek.html to Infoseek, while it will tell you that it has accepted the entire URL, in reality, it will ignore the infoseek.html portion and will only accept the home page of the domain mysite.com. This underlines the importance of linking the hallway page with your home page. If you do not link it, Infoseek will never find the hallway page. And if it does not find the hallway page, it wont spider the doorway pages either.

Before ending, I must again add a caveat - I dont like such doorway pages and hallway pages. Use them only as a last resort when nothing else works.

About the Author

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Article by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected and recognized search engine positioning specialists on the Internet.


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