You might be asking, “Why is Google getting into the interior design business?”

A doorway, in the wide world of the internet, is a page that focuses specifically on a keyword or location purely to rank highly on search engines. So say you service a particular area, you would create a page specifically for each major town or city you operate in with barely different content. So whenever someone searches for “service” “city”, your page has a high likelihood of showing on the first page.

Long acknowledged as a black hat SEO technique, creating doorway pages is often pitched to local businesses as a means to get a leg up on competitors. The reason it is considered black hat is that it provides nothing but keywords to a website, no functionality or unique information. It’s easy to do and allows black hat or just lazy SEO specialists to charge bargain bin prices to get results.

We’ve always shyed away from the technique and now Google is stepping in and making some changes. The new algorithm is going to start penalizing websites that offer doorway pages, which means that website rankings are going to drop and visibility is going to drop. Competitors that chose to go the white hat route will rise in the rankings and black hat SEO specialists will have to find another way to trick the system.