What are doorways and should you attract doorway traffic?

Doorway technology appeared back in the 2000s. Back then search engines weren’t as technologically advanced as they are now and they analyzed websites only for the keywords they contained.  Websites that contained the highest number of words and phrases relevant to the query got to the top of the search results. Since then, doorways have been used by webmasters as cheap traffic sources. Are doorways still relevant and can you use them to earn money in Ukraine? 

 

What is doorway traffic?

A doorway is a website that was created with the sole purpose of attracting organic traffic through SEO. Doorways often use queries that aren’t too popular, and due to the low competition, such websites quickly find themselves at the top of the search results.

Search engines fight doorway sites because this promotion method violates search engine policies. The doorway site itself does not contain any useful content for the user. That’s why when the user attempts to access the doorway, they are redirected to the website promoted by the latter (hence the name).

How to attract doorway traffic

To the user, the doorway looks like a list of random meaningless words. But a search engine recognizes these as popular user keyword queries. It is due to the many keywords that it moves to the top of the search organically.

Since search engine algorithms are constantly changing, doorway generators are also constantly evolving to keep up. Usually doorways are generated in batches using special scripts and posted online. Then they leave the ones that got promoted the most and scrap all the rest.

Then they add a redirect link to the promoted doorway. That way, in the search results, a user sees a doorway-website matching their query but when they click on it, they get sent to a regular website without even noticing it.

Doorways are used to redirect people to landing pages that have info about the offer and a link leading to it.

Doorway traffic is incredibly cheap since the only cost is the program that automatically generates doorways. The webmaster gets free organic traffic from the search results.

Types of doorway traffic

Doorway traffic is divided into three groups, depending on the method used to attract it.

 

Black doorways

The doorway consists of nothing but keywords and queries. When attempting to visit the page, the user is automatically redirected to the promoted website. Nowadays such doorways are automatically blocked by search engines because of the fast redirects.

 

Gray doorways 

Gray doorways are usually used to transfer the link mass. Typically, such sites host an enormous number of links to third-party resources. Links leading to the website are crucial  for SEO. That’s why they are sold on link exchanges.

 

White doorways

White doorways don’t violate search engine rules. These are white-hat websites that contain lots of links to other resources for their intended purpose: directories, catalogs, aggregators, phone or address databases.

 

In affiliate marketing, white doorways are used. These can be catalogs of gambling and betting offers, casino reviews, and offer aggregators. You can additionally monetize such websites by placing ads on them.

 

How to create a doorway for affiliate marketing

• when creating doorways, it’s best to use trackable domains;
• manually or with the help of special software, collect keyword phrases that you’ll use to promote your site;
• optimize the doorway. You can hire a copywriter or generate content automatically. You need to place the text, fill out the meta tags, set up the files in the directory, and so on;
• set up a redirect, you can redirect traffic to a landing page with an offer or to the latter directly;
• promote the doorway with the help of constantly placed texts with keyword phrases and links from third-party resources;

 

To ensure a profit and good traffic volumes, you need to automate this process. To use doorways as traffic sources, you need to launch websites by the hundreds.

Issues of working with doorway traffic

Despite the low price of doorway traffic, with every year the number of webmasters willing to work with it is decreasing. The main reason being that doorways contradict the ad income goals of search engines. After all, websites that were perfectly generated by a program rise to the top of search results very quickly and there is no need to purchase additional traffic for them.

Most often, doorways are moderated manually, which is why they don’t last very long. The lifetime of a typical doorway ranges from 1 to 6 months.

To get a constant flow of traffic from doorways, you need to massively create new sites and implement them to replace the ones that got blocked. Also, search engines block domains, so new pages will require new addresses.

 

Conclusion

Cheap doorway traffic can be attracted if you know how to work with the appropriate software, compile semantic cores and constantly scale the number of these websites. You’ll never get a decent volume of traffic for affiliate programs with just a couple of doorways. That’s why not all APs accept doorway traffic. Usually, the webmasters that work with doorways are professionals that have been getting traffic this way for years.  

If you’ve decided to get into doorway traffic now, then the obvious better choice would be to focus your attention on some other traffic source, since working with doorways is becoming increasingly harder with each passing year.